AOL Messageboard mess (Rant Warning)

I have been an AOL user for 12 years now. I started on their service back in 1993, when it was pay by the hour, and my disk said AOL version 1.3. Back then, it was primarily for Macintosh users, because, unlike Windows at the time (which was still in basic and whose latest innovation seemed to be the C prompt), it used a graphical interface.

Well, time has passed, and time hasn't been kind to AOL, or the people who use it. Specifically, java ads have taken over the message boards, slowing loading time to a crawl, Terms of Service is a joke (especially if the offender is a fundamentalist Christian), and now, the worst of all, AOL has "upgraded" their messageboards to a new and "Improved" format.

Well, it may be new, but isn't "improved" supposed to mean "Better"? "Better for whom" would be a good question to ask, because there are *Many* AOL messageboard users complaining that the new boards are *not* an improvement. In fact, for Macintosh users who *aren't* using OS X, (and thus, can't run AOL 6.0), you can't use the message boards from AOL at all!

In fact, to use the boards, I have to sign onto AOL, open my web browser (because AOL's web browser is a joke which doesn't work half of the time), and sign on to AOL on the internet just to *see* the boards. And because of the Java ads, it takes forever to move between one page and the next.

So, essentially, AOL is now, for me, a $30 a month e-mail address. And I could get that much more cheaply elsewhere.

Don't like it either? Complain! Go to Keyword: Tell Us! on AOL and tell them, like that actor in the film "Network News", "I'm Mad as Hell And I'm Not Gonna Take it Anymore!"