Anti-AOL

Every now and then I make my stats viewable, regret it, then close them again, but at any rate, limited stats for my current counter are open again; my last counter's stats (it broke - my counters for this blog break all the time) will be open indefinitely.

It's kind of neat to look over past stats, see which pages were most popular, try to figure out why, and so on, so if you geek out on that sort of thing, go for it. The last counter, which I probably installed in 2008 because they break so frequently, has stats going back to spring of 2006 (carried over from Sitemeter several times, since I switched back and forth through about mid-2008).

The stats are accurate within a few thousand visits and page views either way, as far as I know. When my GoStats counters break I just run estimates for the missing days based on averages for the current week and add them in myself. I try to be fair, so my figures might run a bit low, and I don't record my own visits (Scout's honor - not that I was ever a Scout). Also, tracking is HTML-based, not JavaScript-based, so that, too, means lots of missing stats.

GoStats has been a funny stat company to do business with. They wooed me right from a comment section of this blog back in 2007. They argued with me when I said I was a Sitemeter fan (despite the problems I had canceling a paid Sitemeter counter at the time, which I wrote about here) and they wouldn't take No for an answer. Just to make them stop leaving comments I ran their counter and a free Sitemeter together for a while.

GoStats has great graphs and ways of breaking down your traffic that Sitemeter doesn't have, and they offer an invisible counter for free, so I got kind of hooked. But since it takes me a long time to make up my mind (sometimes, it takes me years) and since my GoStats counters kept breaking (I have a Support Request archive as long as your arm - it's unreal many times my counters have broken) I kept switching back to Sitemeter.

Now when my counters break they don't even answer my Support Requests - and I kind of don't expect them to. I know their advice will be to make a new counter, and they know that I know it, so I wait a few days just to make sure no one responds, then I run an estimate for all my missing stats and start over.

That's why this time there's an old and a new counter. Normally I delete the old counter once it breaks but this time I thought, why do that? Why not keep an archive? I think this year's visits have been good, considering I haven't promoted the site on Digg in years, and have never promoted it on Reddit, StumbleUpon, or anywhere else significant. The most promotion this blog ever gets is when I include the URL in a comment signature. I limit myself to relatively few sites to comment upon, and I think almost everyone knows me on those, so they're sending me few new visitors.

All that considered, this blog is doing OK. I'm glad for that, since I only want it to reach the people who actually need it (although I still dream of it somehow taking over the world the way, you know, TechCrunch has).

Couple of notes - LJ cuts aren't working right now - the text behind them simply disappears when I include them, which I wanted to do to shorten this up for the front page, and my post previews are displaying in my CSS testing journal, leading me to wonder if LJ is getting hacked - I even deleted the CSS journal to make the preview pages stop pointing to it, cleared my cache and cookies, and started over, and still the now-deleted journal is the only one showing up in post previews. So I have no idea which journal this will wind up on.

So I've been involuntarily offline the last few days. I moved to a new place...a homey, rustic cabin on the water - just what I wanted (I'm so proud of this place - and so happy with it - I could spit). My Internet just got turned on this morning. Yipppeee!

I have 5 days of news and reader's email to catch up on, and I haven't checked AOL's stock quote yet, but I have checked micwa's latest comment, which lead me to this hilarious re-branding video of AOL's (the rebranding is in effect as of today). If the first five seconds of it don't send you hurtling off your chair laughing, nothing will, and the rest of it is pretty funny, too.

Just for my readers (I love you all!), the night before I moved, I made a logo to show my strong commitment to AOL's new branding strategy. Enjoy. ;)

So last week was Retro Week at the house of Anti-AOL. Just for old time's sake I installed AOL 9.0 Optimized and AOL 9.0 SE on my computer (both ancient versions of AOL, in case you didn't know), confident that my own how-tos would help pull me out of any issues removing them.

Boy, was I wrong.

I spent days trying to understand why what I wrote to guide others through this very problem was made out of pure fail. The problem itself was this: the AOL Uninstaller (Choose Which Products to Remove) hung while searching for other versions of AOL, regardless of which version of AOL I installed - at one point, I had both versions mentioned above, plus AOL 9.0VR, but still, no dice.

It's not that I suck - is it?

By last Friday I was ready to leave myself a comment on most of my removal articles saying that I suck and to just delete the entire blog to save face while I still could, but then I thought better of it, if only because I was finally getting a little much-needed attention in News. With so many eyes on your blog you can't just go...

I give up - AOL wins again!

So anyway, I'm going to guide others through removing AOL from Vista by doing the very thing I hate doing and have told others not to do dozens of times - just delete it. It's not as easy as it sounds, it's not fun, and it's not quick, but it can be done safely and effectively if you take the steps in the right order. My next post will have the actual how-to.

This post is just me letting off some steam before I write it.

What puzzles me the most is, I've had dozens of AOL installations on my Vista systems over the years (purely for testing purposes) and removed them without hassles in almost all cases. When I did run into hassles, my own tutorials got me through them.

This marks the first time I've understood what everyone else is talking about when they email me that a certain how-to (or none of the how-tos) is working for them. My guess is that having Vista fully updated to SP2 might have something to do with AOL's wayward inability to uninstall. But honestly, I just can't figure it out.

The account for this journal was set to expire, based on when I started paying for it back in 2006, on Jan. 24th. While I usually renew early - in case, I don't know, I get hit by a train or something - thanks to a contest I entered on LiveJournal that I won, I can go back to my more natural inclination to put off renewing for a while. But I will be putting one more year of paid time on this blog before next June or July - it's got nine lives, somehow.

You can read more about the contest here.

I'm asking because one of my primary annoyances is not having an all-in-one browser/IM/email client to usher ex-AOL users to once they're ready to quit AOL. For years I've wanted to be able to say to them, "There's this program named X that works just like AOL does, with instant messaging, email, and browsing all in one client, but it runs on a more modern layout engine, loads more pages the right way than AOL or IE does, and it's safer to use and more enjoyable than AOL is."

Outside of SeaMonkey, there is nothing on the market that I know of that can replace not just what AOL has, but the way AOL combines it all into one client. I don't think it's a bad thing to just use Firefox and say, Yahoo! webmail and/or Outlook if you like, and to keep an AIM or MSN client on the computer for chat, but for people who have used AOL forever and like having all three tools ready-to-go in one browser, having a replacement for that would make it much easier for them to move away from AOL.

While I like SeaMonkey for it's strong Mozilla/Gecko backbone, it falls short of what I'd want to see ex-AOLers using for several reasons: the GUI is out-of-date and would need a complete re-write to bring it up to today's standards, you can't use too many Firefox add-ons or any Firefox themes with it, and the few SeaMonkey themes that are available are getting pretty old. SeaMonkey crashes a lot, and it does not work with AOL's SMTP (at least, not as of last night). It doesn't include any modern chat, just Chatzilla/IRC.

I would like to see a more modernized version of the SeaMonkey client, or an entirely new client that is simply a fork of the old project. That would keep the price of moving away from AOL as low as possible (free) and make it more tempting and a little easier to cancel AOL, knowing a full replacement that works pretty much like the AOL client does is already lined up, ready and waiting for people on their computers.

Short of that, if a pay project for a non-open source client was to be started for such a thing, I was thinking that just charging a small amount for the first, say, 10,000 downloads (maybe $1?) could pay all of the costs, which would keep the browser free later on for the majority of people who will use it.

Unfortunately, I can't code, so I can't write and publish such a program, but if anyone has any ideas for such a project, please drop me a comment here or email me with what you think.

Maybe this is not the "cool" or "in" thing to say, but I think such a client could have potential well beyond the AOL crowd. How cool would it be if you could combine browsing, email, IM (or maybe an embedded Meebo page), along with Twitter, Facebook and Flock-like "Post to such and such site" tools into one client? Because, seriously, it's a pain to open Firefox, AIM, and Digsby, then jump back and forth between all the windows, plus it can put a big strain on a computer's RAM and CPU - at least on older computers, which a lot of us (like me!) still have.

Thoughts?

So...I've begun a new community. I guess you could say I'm tired of people thinking I don't like AOL at all. It's been a rotten company for people to work for and for consumers to deal with but I have this tiny hope that with new management in place (Tim Armstrong as CEO, especially) things might change enough in the future that you won't even recognize it (especially if it goes out of business...OK, I'm just kidding...sort of).

AOL's products and services do have bright spots...and you'd have to be rabid with bias against AOL to disagree. Arguing with a reporter at the Wall Street Journal a few months ago about why I actually do like a few things they do at AOL turned out to be exactly the sort of epiphany I wasn't looking for...it made me realize the gulf between who I am online, thanks to owning this blog, and who I am in real life is a bit wider than I thought. So check it out...

Just FYI, I'm going to keep this blog up in spite of owning the community. I don't see any conflict, since it seems most of my rants are behind me (but if AOL does stupid things in the future I won't hesitate to point them out). This blog helps a lot of people remove AOL products they don't want or need, so, seriously, it's not going anywhere.

This layout was made all the way back in Dec., 2006, which means it's kinda oooooold. But everyone always liked it the best. And I always liked it the best. Rather than going with my last edits, which were made quite a while ago and were hideous, I started from scratch.

One problem a lot of style sheet/CSS editing people have, including me, is fighting the original designer's vision. I did that with this style sheet the last time around. This time I tried to make the changes I wanted without distracting from the original layout.

I haven't gotten to testing it in anything but Firefox so IE/AOL users bear with me; by early next week I should have the kinks worked out. Never mind; got a second wind from my home-cooked steak dinner and blew threw testing - the layout should work all the way back to IE5.5/Win 2000/ME now; if there's any wonkiness I missed leave a comment.

10-22-09: I'd like to point out that I've made a lot of changes since I reverted to this layout: I've increased the font size for all sections of the blog and changed the default font for Vista users from a generic Windows font to Segoe UI; I've fixed most of the bugs with the comment sections, which are buggy because I had to hack them to fix LJ's hard-coding, which by default shifts the comments into columns too narrow to read comfortably, and I've re-instated Section 508 features which are in the hard-coding by default, such as outlines on links, to ensure readability.

On the HTML side, I've been working on navigation since I can't find my own way around. To that end I've had hacks in place for years that use the title and subtitle to direct you "home" and the how-to's, respectively; I've used up all the nav links I'm allowed in the sidebar to get you where you need to go; I've re-instated site search using Scroogle.org's Google scraper, which sends no personal information to Google (it's exactly like surfing Google on a proxy), and I've tried to flesh out my textbox near the end of the sidebar to get you the answers you may need.

Not that it proves anything - it could be another company that thinks it's still competing with AOL (perhaps Earthlink dial-up? or Yahoo email?) - but while checking my stats recently I came across a visit from Brandwatch.net, a reputation-monitoring company. Well, I'll be damned...that's interesting.

Assuming the client worried enough about their reputation to have Brandwatch read and/or monitor this page of my ongoing rant against AOL is AOL (in that entry I took the unusual - for me - step of coming right out and calling the people who run AOL "liars, thieves and crooks") that would mean they're paying this outfit money to keep tabs on what people think of them.

Instead of using Brandwatch how about AOL fires them and takes my word for it (my advice, after all, is FREE): AOL's reputation has been in tatters for oh, at least the last 5 or 6 years. And you can write that on a rock.

Updated 7-1-09.

Since I wrote this post it's risen to the #1 slots for the keyword searches mentioned below, so to save you time if you're here for the phone number to report a hacked AOL or AIM account: it's 1-800-307-7969.

Tonight I typed "report hacked aol email" into Google and got, among other irrelevant things: "how to hack an AOL account". Brilliant! Just to ensure my fury shot from moderate to severe, I typed "contact aol hacked" next, and got the same damn results....curses on Google. May fire rain down from heaven all over their precious servers.

I'm trying to get someone help at this very moment for an account that's been hacked and I CANNOT DO IT. Half of it's Google's fault for not returning the phone numbers this person needs - the other half is AOL's fault for not allowing free members to report hacked accounts (I don't have this nailed down yet, but that's the info I'm working on in this person's email, since I list a number to report hacked accounts here; I'm trying to find out if this person called it or not).

7-1-09: Got a response from the person who sought my help with her hacked account last night: "Thank you for giving me this number. I had not called it, but I did today, and they were helpful and cancelled the account. Hopefully it's all taken care of. Thank you again!" Whew.

Since I had a feeling she simply could not find the number, I have added the number itself to my links list (you will see it if you look now on the side of the page) so no one else has to go through not being able to find it again. I hate seeing someone suffer for the lack of something so simple - an AOL phone number that everyone seems to want to hide.

While I'm relieved the person who emailed me is now getting help, and also relieved to learn AOL still assists free users who's accounts are hacked, as far as Google goes, after what I saw last night...Google can blow me.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not against my own blog. The longer I own it, the more I like the darned thing. It helps AOL users who the call reps at AOL are either incapable of helping, or else forbidden to help, since they have to make their sales quotas. No one can overestimate how good it makes me feel.

What I have become sorely, vehemently against is people who look down their noses at those among us who "still" use AOL. It burns me. I used AOL...if I hadn't, this blog would never have existed.

I'm unhappy with the reporter who I spoke to the other day. If I were to tell you who I spoke to at the Wall Street Journal there might be a few ooh's and ahh's, but I wasn't impressed before I spoke to her (I called her after she emailed me for a phone chat), since I tend to be cynical about mainstream media, and I'm much less impressed now. The story is not, as I led on earlier, so much about this blog, but I don't want to blow her lede in case the WSJ runs the story, so I'll just mention what bothered me most.

Sample Questions

"So...what do you think of people who still use AOL? I mean, isn't it like, wow, get with the times already?"

I don't look down on anyone simply because they "still" use AOL. First of all: I used to use it, and the last time I checked, that didn't make me a slobbering idiot. Second of all: my friends, including people who have helped me get jobs, people who have comforted when I felt like I was falling apart - people who mean the world to me - "still" use AOL. They might be techno-phobes; they might be computer-illiterate; they might be both, but none of those conditions makes them either dumb or willfully ignorant. They just don't know much about ISPs and email services until someone tells them or they finally find out for themselves. I don't see why people should be made fun of for such things - does not knowing much about the Web automatically make you "stupid"?

"So do people still email you from aol.com email addresses? Really? What do you think of them?"

Again she was angling for snark, and again it bothered me. I explained to her that if you're having a problem canceling AOL but haven't set up service with another ISP yet you're pretty much going to have to email me from an aol.com address.

"Free AOL email...a lot of people use that, don't they? Aren't there better options, though, like GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and so on?"

Now my face was turning red. Though I was quick to agree with her that there are better options than keeping your aol.com address, I was barely able to keep my voice from shaking as I said, "The thing with free AOL email is...it's free. So why not keep the free address once you cancel your account? Plus some people have used AOL for years - sometimes 15, 20 years - so their contact lists are extremely long...not being too computer or Internet savvy they don't know how to update everyone with their new email address...so they just stick with [their old one]."

At that point, I hate to say it, I was rolling my eyes and wondering how long it would be before we hung up.

I sat at my computer editing the layout you see here for a few hours after our call ended, just rolling around what we discussed. And that was when I decided I was done with snark. Yes, I'm against AOL - as much now, with every drop of energy I have in me, as I was in late 2005 when I started this blog -but I am not against anyone who "still" uses it. My job - the one I gave myself years ago - is to show people why AOL sucks - not belittle them for their choices.

So count me against anyone who's against anyone else who "still" uses AOL.