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AOL user ban...mods?

T

ThisIsMatt

Banned
Is there any chance this will be lifted (seems it was for a few months, but now it's implimented again)? It kinda bites having to sign on to a free ISP just to post messages.

Please refrain from the "AOL sucks" posts, because I've heard it a plenty of times. I've got my reasons for staying on it, and don't plan to leave for the time being.
 
The reason AOL is banned (correct me if I'm wrong, I wasn't here at the time), is because when some of their users decided to be disruptive on the forums, AOL didn't give out information to help resolve this.

If AOL changed their policy (which I doubt), the admin would probably reverse this decision.


Final answer: don't bet on it.
 
It's odd, cause for the last month or so I've been able to post while using AOL, but today it won't work again...oh well...
 
Did they ban AOL by IP address or by email address? I thought it was by email address, but I guess I'm wrong.
Oh well.
 
they banned AOL by the IP addys they used. a while back I thought I had been banned, but I found some ip's the mods had missed by accident so I was logging on by luck. after inquiring, they promtly banned those ips too, which meant on posting from my parents house. so I would say that if you have been lucky enough to post from AOL, that will change shortly, I'm pretty sure the ban is going to stay, and rightly so.
 
The AOL ban was never lifted. We just keep buying so many damn ip addresses that they miss some every once in a while.
 
The reason AOL is banned (correct me if I'm wrong, I wasn't here at the time), is because when some of their users decided to be disruptive on the forums, AOL didn't give out information to help resolve this.

I certainly doubt that AOL was supposed to 'give information about their users'. By law, AOL nor any other ISP is allowed to reveal personal information about their users.

Moderator, I am not asking you to unban AOL, but how about if you just exclude our IP addresses from that list?

Is this possible?
If so, please do it. I am sure that many of us would appreciate it.
 


<< AOL IP addresses are dynamic, and change every time you log on. >>



Not entirely so. AOL uses proxy servers, so they can change everytime you access a page. It is impossible to track an AOL user by his IP address.

Hmmmm... maybe they do both, not sure. Looking through some web page logs... I see things like:
aca374d7.ipt.aol.com
cache-dc01.proxy.aol.com

The first may be a dynamically assigned IP, the second is obviously a proxy. Not sure.

Shoot, I even have a few users that appear to be using the AOL browser but coming from uu.net and other hosts. I dunno why, that doesn't make sense to me.
 


<< AOL uses proxy servers, so they can change everytime you access a page. It is impossible to track an AOL user by his IP address. >>



thats probably the main reason why they ban whole ranges. if they could track individual users then this problem would not exist. but unfortunately for the sensible AOL users, this problem does exist.
 


<< By law, AOL nor any other ISP is allowed to reveal personal information about their users. >>


Unless you break the terms of agreement, which in most cases includes &quot;... posting off topic or harrassing materials on message boards ...&quot; From:Time Warner, Road Runner Internet Users Agreement Statement
 
Here's an idea, although it may be difficult to impliment:

Leave the block on all AOL users, but make an exception for &quot;good&quot; AOL Anandtech users (like myself 🙂), so when the &quot;good&quot; users log in, their IP is unbanned...

Okay, not sure if that made sense...
 
I would link to my huge thread on this, but it seams to have dissapeared...
edit- just kidding (didn't know the archive search was changed)
my newspaper of a post

I have talked to the mods alot about this, and i will tell you that i am pretty sure aol is not going to be unbanned.

the reason for this is that there was a troll who used aol, and they couldent work with aol to get rid of him.
Aol looks at is as a minor problem with a minor site that isnt worth their time. Plus the fact that many of their customer service reps are stupid.
Anandtech looks at aol users as a small minority in there 30,000+ members and not worth any more time than they have already spent trying to work with aol.

It is sad but true.

Here is a link to a site that i found, it is a fake publication, kinda funny, kinda sad:
national tatler

hope i helped
 
AOL is not going to be unbanned (as its already been said) the reason for the ban is a few individuals were being a real PITA (pain in the ass), the mods and anandtech tried to work with AOL on fixing the problem, when AOL refused, anandtech banned the E-mail addresses AND IP addresses. The mods asked for help from the AOL users, and nothing seemed to happen. I belive that it is a violation of AOL's TOS to troll (not in those exact words) however it seems that AOL is not willing to enforce their own rules. if AOL changes the ban may be lifted but intil then it stays, if you wanna use these boards, then don't use AOL. you know the ban is in effect. so dont whine about it. these threads pop up about once ever 2 weeks they are so often that the mods and zuni have stopped listening. again use AOL you lose the boards.
 
Narzy: great post. But BTW I, an aol user, asked the mods if i could help, but it really is a lost cause and should be dropped.

i think that a good thread about this should be archieved and so whenever a new link like this pops up you could just link it to the archieved thread, and lock the new thread. That way there would be one big discussion for annyone that cared.
 
Glad I came across this thread. I was banned from posting when I was at my parent's house, couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. Now I know what's going on, figured something like that was what happened.
 
this isn't about AOL, but my yahoo address was banned when i tried to sign up on it. are yahoo addresses banned for some reason?

thanks
--jacob

Addresses from yahoo, hotmail, and many other free Web-based mail services are banned because, in the past, we have had major problems with trolls who, once banned, would immediately re-register using a different email address obtained rapidly from one of these freemail services. Unless you have moderated a large forum, you may not be able to imagine what is meant by the term 'major problems' in this context. Cleaning up hundreds of idiotic troll threads, only to have the troll resurface a few minutes later, is a frustrating and wasteful use of our time. Banning the quickie freemail addresses may inconvenience a few, but it has made things run more smoothly behind the scenes.

AnandTech Moderator
 
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