Anti-AOL

Readers tipped me off today that something is wrong with AOL's Message Boards: in fact, most of them are missing. The UK Message Boards were shut down with no warning whatsoever.* (See the end of this post for my UK boards disclaimer) Many UK chat rooms were also shut down. No one knows where the US Message Boards have gone. When you click on the "Is this the last board left?" topic which is found one-off from AOL's Message Board home page you're taken to...I kid you not...Yahoo!, where a board exists for AOL members to wonder aloud where AOL's message boards went. It's a bizarre situation.

Some message boards remain - but they're hard to find - and now many look like blogs - when they don't look like pea soup!

On March 31st all of the AOL message boards disappeared. According to Bumped Tek, "On April 1st, the old format boards re-appeared for a few moments then quickly vanished." Even when some of the boards returned later today, they were no longer reachable from search engines (when you click the results link for the Travel Board, for example, you're brought to the main Message Board page). The only way you can access AOL's remaining Message Boards is by visiting them directly from the Message Board home page since the links used up until March 31st (which are still shown in search engine results) no longer work.

Incredibly, most of the newly formatted Message Boards are unusable because the body copy on the Topic Lists is jamming together in clumps.

Welcome! You've got angry customers!

Once you find top level posts on the remaining boards, you'll see that many of them now look like top-level blog posts followed by comment sections. The posts look like articles on AOL News - the format is the same. If you scroll to the bottom of the "boards" a comment form is there. You're not exchanging messages anymore; you're just leaving comments. The AOL Message Boards are now the AOL Message Blogs! The changes have so disturbed AOL users that they've turned the AOL Auto Board into a rant zone.

According to Bumped Tek, "It seems AOL will be moving some message boards over to their blog network..."

Between being unable to find their favorite message boards and unable to recognize them once they're found, I think AOL has done themselves in in the eyes of their users, who seem confused, frustrated and angered by the changes. To be fair (if not too balanced!) AOL gave some warning - a single blog post on People Connection three weeks ago. Still, it seems nothing could prepare AOL Message Board users for this.

Three boards (just a small sample - there are many more) that are no longer accessible from their old web addresses or from search engine results:

• AIM Developers Board
• AOL Travel Board
• AOL Black Voices/Fitness Board

Comments from AOL users:

AOL is a FUSTERCLUCK !!!

So their idea of "changes" is annhilation??

I am clicking my heels three times and reciting 'There is no place like home'. I am so lost.

I didn't get to tell anyone good bye...

...this is the ONLY reason i have kept AOL and if they are going to just force us to use yahoo then why even keep it any longer?

This is a prime example of what happens to American business when it's outsourced overseas. It goes down the tubes!

I'm on Yahoo from an AOL link? Say what???

Me too mona! I signed into my AOL and for some reason got re-directed here...ugh! ugh! ugh! what's even more weird I logged onto my vegasmermaid sn and it came up dragonflie63 which is my account on yahoo! I don't get it!!!

It certainly seems that AOL doesn't give a rat's backside about people looking for intelligent conversation about politics and serious news.

post a link if you find some [AOL] board still open.

Today a quote on this blog about the closing down of the AOL UK Message Boards and chat rooms: "I think AOL have made the decision that they don't really want customers."

Angry about the loss of the message boards? Have any tips on when things will smooth out for AOL users on remaining boards? Want to start an official page on boards that are still open? Want to petition AOL to change the remaining boards back to their old style? Reply below.

* My UK Boards disclaimer: Initial comments left on my blog from people in the UK show some users reacted as though they had no warning whatsoever of the UK Message Board shutdowns, but later comments (below) and even a tip I received - but did not read in time - indicate AOL UK users were given some sort of warning two weeks to a month in advance - every fact is still in dispute as of this writing, though. 4-5-09: So far all I can find on the web is a cache of a board that says UK users were notified by pop-up when they clicked on a "Community Board" link.

4-5-09: Did AOL know five months ago that they were closing the UK boards this year - but forgot to tell CarPhone Warehouse call reps who work for AOL not to leak the information? The message board linked to shows what appears to be a cover-up that went fairly well. AOL simply blamed the Carphone Warehouse call rep who emailed this AOL customer for not understanding how AOL works. Interesting stuff!

By the way, to my new visitors and long-time readers...thanks for mentioning this blog (oh, and good job hijacking the Basketball board)!

Postscript, 4-15-09: AOL restored most of the missing US message boards yesterday, saying "you spoke, and we listened". Well, it's about time, isn't it? A complete list of resurrected boards is here. Folks, it always pays to complain when you don't think you're getting what you deserve - how this story ended is perfect proof of that. Keep on fighting!

After I got done today responding to Joe Manna on this issue, I started answering my email for the first time in weeks, and one of my reader's questions about AOL's email storage policies brought me to Wikipedia's page on AOL. That wouldn't normally reveal the answer to something going on at AOL that it seems nobody has the answer for, but lo and behold the page was updated recently (run-on paragraphs abound; the italicized swath was italicized by me):

Members who joined AOL Australia from 1999 (when they first set up operations in Aus) up to 1st November 2008, were badly affected by recent AOL Australian Management changes. In Feb 2004 most AOL dial-up customers were 'forcibly' migrated to iPrimus telecom when Primus bought out AOL. iPrimus then put users on to their own dial-up or ADSL service, and switched old AOL accounts to the global 'free AOL email' service to allow uninterrupted AOL email access. 'Members' continued to access their original AOL accounts until around 1st December 2008 by using the US based AOL Webmail or alternative IMAP based email local client service such as Outlook. Access to member's free AOL email box was possible through any ISP. AOL Australia then attempted to raise much needed cash, so decided (remarkably) to force free users back to using their old, paid for, dial up service, even though by then most people already had internet access through iPrimus or other ISP. If AOL had an active valid credit card on record, members were to be billed again completely by surprise. If AOL Australia couldn't get the cash from a valid card, members had their 'free AOL email' account suspended, leaving existing users in a state of complete confusion and disarray. Members wanting to keep their email addresses had to pay AOL AU$6 a month within 90 days. AOL did not send out notification emails to AOL 'free email' users, but only to iPrimus email addresses and AOL dial-up software users. Members 'free AOL email' boxes with files and address books were cancelled until they paid up. Thousands of AOL customers were considerably upset by this course of action, which caused the reputation of AOL Australia to become even worse than it was already.

If the above quote is true [citation needed?], that solves the mystery of what happened to Australian users free AOL accounts.

Haven't had time to delve too deeply into this but throughout December I continued to receive tips that AOL is canceling any free AOL account created "overseas". Here's the most recent tip (end of December-ish):

My (free webmail) AOL account has been cancelled. I don't know why, there was no warning or explanation. I have lodged queries with Yedda.com and see that several other people (who all appear to be in Australia) have the same problem. No response has been received at Yedda.com.

Their message (below) is not very helpful. The phrases "at this time" and "Try Again" seem to imply hope that the account will be restored at some "time".

AOL have not given any information about what's going on here nor have they let us know HOW to restore our accounts. Even if I could login to get my address book details I would be happy.

Their HELP and Troubleshooting areas do not address this problem at all, you just end up going around in never-ending circles. We even managed to get to speak to a person at AOL (after using one of the phone numbers shown on your site) - but they didn't seem to be aware of the issue!

Message follows:-

Account Cancelled (Non-US)

We are sorry. You will not be able to access this service at this time. Your screen name is associated with a cancelled account and a mailbox can not be created for you at this time.

Try Again

Help and Troubleshooting | Help Pages | AOL.com

The Technical Stuff:

Error Code: C0FE022B

Report ID: 30223-webmail-20081216-090600

I was disinclined to believe Frank's tip after I read it, but by checking my email and anonymous tipline, following the matter on sites like veryrecent.com, and checking forums on other websites I've gathered enough anecdotal evidence to believe free overseas email accounts were canceled left and right without warning or notice throughout December (but the majority of canceled accounts seem, for some reason, to be concentrated in Australia). I'm not sure what's going on, or why AOL made no announcement to the media or on their own websites. Anyone want to fill us in? Especially anyone at AOL (AOLers, you can always comment anonymously)? Please bring us up to speed here.

Checking xdrive.com and bluestring.com tonight I saw that AOL has extended the shutdown deadlines by 12 days on both sites. That means you now have until Jan. 12th to get your files before AOL deletes them. In light of AOL's botched soft-closing of Hometown and AOL Journals [item #5], which was handled so badly that many users claimed they never even received an email about it, and thus did not know they had to retrieve their files by a certain date or else lose them forever, AOL is slowing down the remaining closings to give people more time to find out what's going on. Unfortunately (and rather inexplicably), AOL did not extend the deadline on the closings of AOL UnCut (Dec. 18th) nor AOL Pictures (Dec. 31st), so if you haven't retrieved your videos and pictures by now, you're most likely out of luck.

Instructions on how to retrieve your files are included in the following related post: AOL closing down Xdrive, BlueString and AOL Pictures by Dec. 31st..

This is interesting: Joe Manna happened to catch a comment on the PeopleConnection blog from the Ficlets creator, Kevin Lawver, a long-time AOLer who left the company in May. Kevin wrote about Ficlets:

I knew this was coming, I just didn’t know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere.

I’ve already written an exporter and have all the stories (the ones not marked “mature” anyway). I have pretty much all of the author bios too. Since I was smart enough to insist that AOL license all the content under Creative Commons, I’ll be launching a “ficlets graveyard” on 1/16 so at least the stories that people worked so hard one will live on.

I have mixed feelings about ficlets’ demise. On the one hand, I’m proud of the work we did on it. I’m thankful that AOL allowed me to build it with a truly amazing group of talented folks. I’m humbled by the community that ficlets attracted and the awards that ficlets won.

On the other hand, I’m sad that I wasn’t allowed to keep working on ficlets. I’m disappointed that AOL’s turned its back on the community, although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

So, to all the ficleteers out there - your stories will live on, and there may be a couple more surprises in the works before 1/15 if I have my way. Be on the lookout… I’ll post any news to my blog: http://lawver.net.

Posted at 9:41PM on Dec 3rd 2008 by Kevin Lawver [source]

Let's recap.

1. AOL chose to shut down Ficlets rather than donate the site and server(s) to a non-profit who would certainly manage the costs from there on in - and probably manage Ficlets - and the community that developed from it - better than AOL did.
2. Next, AOL refused to give Ficlets to the very person who created it.
3. Luckily, a contract stipulation that Kevin insisted on before handing Ficlets over to AOL puts the content under a Creative Commons license so it can be reprinted by Ficlet users or Kevin himself. He's going to work on that starting on Jan. 16th. Unluckily, any such undertaking is guaranteed to be a massive and expensive pain in the ass for Kevin, who wouldn't have to go through such a rough transition if AOL had simply agreed to items 1 or 2.
4. Finally, Joe speculates that Ron Grant, the COO at AOL, was playing favorites all along, so with Kevin Conroy, the former Executive Vice President of Products and Marketing at the time Ficlets was acquired out, and Bill Wilson in, Ficlet's demise was inevitable - and predictably quick.

As to Joe's speculation...is it just me, or will AOLers fight with each other about anything and try to outdo each other every chance they get?

It reminds me of how AOL killed the Netscape browser in late 2007 (which no doubt came about after yet another fight) when they refused to sell the code to anyone else. Even though Netscape was built on open-source code, AOL owned the name "Netscape" so they didn't legally "have to" allow anyone else to continue developing it. I liked the Netscape browser (who wouldn't - it's last iterations were just like Firefox) so that decision, like most of AOL's decisions, rubbed me the wrong way.

The Ficlets story, like the Netscape story, speaks volumes, showing us again how cruel, stubborn and out-of-touch AOL still is - even in the midst of their last, waning days.

Just got a comment from "Frank" saying:

I just found out - not sure if this is true - that AOL has sold off (is selling off) all its international operations. This has already happened to the Uk and Australia. If you use webmail or have set up a free webmail post box (as suggested on every AOL home page) - and are not an AOL paying subscriber, you will suddenly be 'cut off' leaving you with a sign in screen message saying that you're not in the US and your account has been cancelled. This applies to everyone who has a .com email address originally outside the US (about 50M people). They will now be moved to .co.uk (for the UK) and .com.au (for Australia).

Without more information from "Frank" I'll have to assume he got his information from a talkative type at one of the AOL call centers - but is what he was told true? If not, why was he told that?

AIM Phoneline Hung Up For Good

Unrelated to the above, but I don't have time to rustle up a new post on it - via Terence Chang - AIM Phoneline will be discontinued as of Jan. 13th, 2009. His post lists plenty of good alternatives. One of my readers tipped me off to problems with canceling AIM Phoneline here.

4-2-09: Many more AOL message boards closed on March 31st and April 1st - read about it here.

This is what I get for not checking my backlinks more often: a post that is one month and six days old.

Unbeknownst to me, this blog was mentioned on an AOL message board on Nov. 1st in relation to whether or not AOL is shutting down its message boards. AOL has since deleted the very board that their discussion took place on (oh, the irony), so this is the cache.

AOL user PGroot wrote in response to a message board titled, "Re: AOL closing message boards?": "Read the response to Alley Insider: "AOL Hit List" Examined".

AOL user SGW7011, aka "Sharon" replied:

"Well, that's nice, but she's only explaining what each is, known statuses on some, that have already had a resolution and guesses on others.

Regarding message boards, it's just a guess. While probably reasonably accurate, it's no offical word.

As I mentioned on another board, I emailed someone within aol, that sent my inquiry to someone else, and got this answer from someone somewhat knowledgable with the aol message boards. I'd like to think the response is honest enough, that it's at least the plan at the moment. We know that aol decisions are not set in stone, they change on a whim.

But this is what I was told:

Hi Sharon -- Thanks for your email concerning the Message Boards. AOL is not planning an overall sunset of its Message Boards, but we are taking a critical look at the use and value of the boards. Hundreds of active Message Boards will be migrated to new platforms by the end of the year along with their current content, while boards that experience little or no use will be shut down.

"New platforms" for "active" message boards? "Boards...will be shut down"? AOL is obviously being cryptic - but apparently the AOL message boards, no matter how active they are, will NOT exist in their current form much longer, since we are fast approaching "the end of the year" (just 27 more days until 2009). This is not good news for AOL message board users.

If the person who replied to Sharon - or anyone else in the know at AOL - wants to fill me in I'd be more than glad to post more concise information to clear up any confusion and/or panic, since just the fact that I'm printing this will probably set off a firestorm among AOL message board users.

Updated 12-7-08 with more information for Ficlets users and 1-13-09 with new information on importing Circavie timelines to Dipity.

OK, I'll admit it: I feel bad for my readers. Some of them are already feeling down over the loss of their small but beloved community and their old photo, video and storage sites. Breaking more bad news for them all the time - which is all I do anymore - is not fun for me, either.

The title of the post was inspired by Twitter's mringlein, who does not give the phrase "on fire" too pleasant a connotation.

The latest victim's of AOL's cost-cutting and streamlining measures are two AOL-branded websites: Circavie and Ficlets, which both have devoted, if not huge, fan bases.

AOL is posting about all shut down sites and services on the AIM-branded People Connection Blog so you can simply check it each day for the status of your favorite AOL website or service - not that there's many of either left to choose from.

If you look closely at the stats you'll see the true story behind these shutdowns. It's not just that AOL is cutting costs, but that traffic year-over-year at these sites was never good in the first place and is not good enough now to keep these sites viable.

In the case of Circavie, a website where you create pictorial timelines of personal events, traffic is exactly the same as it was one year ago (roughly 2,000 uniques daily), but that's down from an all-time high of 13,000 daily visitors last November - in other words, Circavie has never done too well for an AOL-branded website since it's launch in July of 2007, and is doing much worse now.

The stats for Ficlets, a website where users work together to create short fictional stories, which launched in March of 2007, tell us pretty much the same story: a peak of 13,700 visits in March of 2007, with traffic hovering today at the 10,000 daily uniques mark - much better than the 4,000 uniques the site saw around this time last year, but still rather dismal for an AOL-branded property.

Update: Unfortunately AOL is telling Ficlets users to simply copy and paste all their entries into Word. People are complaining on the PeopleConnection blog that with perhaps hundreds of entries to back up and save it's going to be a time-consuming, tedious process, but as another commenter suggested, AOL has gotten "too lazy" to get a developer to whip up a simple exporter for Ficlets users.

Fortunately, the person who created Ficlets, Kevin Lawver, created his own Ficlets exporter, and will work on getting the existing content back online by Jan. 16, 2009.

Update #2, 1-13-09: A comment to this post informs us that Dipity (see next paragraph for more info), a service similar to Circavie, now has a free importer you can use to save your Circavie timelines on the Dipity website.

An excellent alternative to Circavie might be Dipity, which lets you create your own timelines pretty much however you want. For group fic writing, LiveJournal actually has tons of communities devoted to it (there's plenty of mature adult content on LiveJournal, though, so check for that before you join any community - if that sort of content bothers you). One way to explore the communities on LJ is to use the site explore page.

Last updated 12-7-08 with more information on active AOL FTP servers via Joe Manna at DygiScape.

Today Joe at taimantis.com is pointing us to a page he put up for AOL Hometown users who forgot to download their files by Oct. 31st, the day AOL shut down both AOL Hometown and AOL Journals. He also forgot to download his Hometown files by Oct. 31st. When he finally remembered he went to grab them and they were still there - AOL did not delete them. He thinks everyone else who missed the Oct. 31st deadline can still grab their files, too and he even gives you quick, easy steps on how to do it.

Update, 11-25-08: Tested Joe's method myself today on some AOL Hometowns using the free program, FTP Commander, that he recommends. It works like a charm - the files AOL said they were deleting by Oct. 31st are in fact, still there, and it's easy to transfer them to your computer. See more comments about it here.

Update, 12-7-08: Joe Manna contacted Joe at Taimantis not long after I published this. The latter Joe put in a guest post for the former Joe on the topic. JM also made a spreadsheet that lists all active FTP servers on AOL so you can see for yourself what's going on. Enjoy.

AOL is shutting down its user-generated video site, originally known as AOL UnCut but now known as "AOL Video Uploads", on Dec. 18th. The usual warning follows (this should be old hat to returning visitors): If you don't download all of the videos you uploaded to AOL by Dec.17th, they will be deleted - poof! - gone - by that night.

The good thing is you probably uploaded any videos AOL is hosting for you from your own computer. As long as those videos are still on your computer, you won't lose anything when AOL deletes the copies they possess. If you lost your copies of those videos, though, you better get cracking.

AOL will be sending email out to all users sometime this week to discuss the shutting down of the AOL UnCut site (I'll refer to it as "AOL UnCut" throughout the rest of this article to save confusion). In the meantime AOL has released a FAQ that you can read here (scroll down a bit to see it).

Miscellaneous Info

AOL uses the Flash 9 video format (FYI, the latest version of the Flash Player technology is Flash 10) for videos uploaded to their site. The Flash format powers most videos and many advertisements on the Web these days, so it's an easy format to download, upload, and work with.

How to download AOL UnCut Video directly from the site...

AOL UK, as usual, offers much more helpful advice on how to save your AOL UnCut videos than the US version of AOL Help does. Their instructions are as follows....

3. How do I save my videos to my computer so I do not lose them?

A: Go to uncutvideo.aol.com/my/videos (UnCut Video is the old name of AOL Video Uploads) or by clicking on the My Uploads button from uncutvideo.aol.com. You will have to sign into the AOL account, AIM account or the email address that you uploaded the videos to. For example, if you uploaded videos using a non-AOL email address, such as.username@talktalk.net, username@neuf.fr, username@cegetel.fr you will need to log in using the same email address and password.

Once you have loaded the My Uploads page you will see all of the videos that you have previously uploaded. Each of the videos has a green 'Download' button that will initiate a download. The videos are downloaded in Flash format and can be saved on your computer, and then uploaded to another video site. Most video sites support uploading in Flash format.

On transferring your videos to MotionBox...

AOL is offering UnCut users the option of moving their videos to MotionBox, a new video site that they have partnered with to help AOL users more easily move their videos (they promise that a switch to MotionBox can be done in "just a few clicks" - details are here). I do not personally recommend moving your videos to MotionBox, so if you decide to do just that, do so with caution.

1. I have never heard of MotionBox before, so I cannot speak to their technology, uptime, reliability, popularity, or their chances of not going out of business within the next year.

2. AOL users, generally speaking, crave a sense of community, and like to make close ties with one another. I cannot say if Motion Box will fulfill these needs for you.

My suggestion is to use YouTube or MetaCafe as a replacement for AOL UnCut. If all you are interested in is uploading and storing your videos safely (not a sense of community so much) Photobucket allows for video uploading, storage, and sharing. I wrote more about Photobucket here.

Using other methods to grab and play back your AOL UnCut videos...

You can also use an external downloader and/or external players to grab and play back your videos. My suggestions are as follows...

Downloading AOL UnCut Videos with IE 7 or Firefox...

For IE 7 users, FlashCatch [download page] is a tiny IE plugin that works with IE's built-in download manager to grab flash videos and save them to the folder of your choice on your computer. I tested it in IE 8 Beta 2 running in Compatibility View for IE 7 and it downloaded UnCut video from AOL flawlessly.

For Firefox users, your options for downloading flash videos are, as you may already know, almost endless. I suggest using Firefox to download your videos without the use of add-ons, or using the VideoDownloadHelper or FlashGot add-on (more tips for both new and advanced Firefox users are here and here).

Playing back AOL UnCut Videos...

There are tons of Flash Players you can use to play Flash videos right from your computer. Using C|Net's "sort by free" link, I found 182 of them.