AOL Users Will Need to Pay $2 a Month For Phone Support

destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month — unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection — and they're being enrolled in the program by default unless they opt out. Ominously, AOL used the exact same wording as when they quietly changed their terms of service to allow them to sell subscribers' home phone numbers to telemarketers. 'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"

Comments

Using even after broadband

[Scutter]

What's astonishing to me is the number of AOL users I encounter who continue to use AOL even after switching to broadband, not because they like AOL's features, but because they think that's the only way to the internet.

"You mean I don't have to use AOL to browse the intarwebs? I don't understand!"

Re:Using even after broadband

[Jimmy King]

I used to do tech support for an ISP who lost a few customers due to AOL, too. It was for a different reason, though.

They had both AOL and us (I don't remember why... probably just testing the waters of a normal ISP as they still had to dial into AOL to use it, if I remember right). Unfortunately, AOL was modifying the tcp stack so that DNS only worked when connected to them. If you uninstalled TCP/IP and reinstalled it, everything would work perfectly while connected to us. That is, until they connected to AOL again, it downloaded a forced update, and that forced updated caused DNS to only work when connected to AOL dial-up. Naturally, the customers then thought our service didn't work right and would stick with AOL.

I thought the first one was a fluke. Unfortunately, this continued to be seen by myself and others there on a regular basis for quite some time.

Re:Using even after broadband

[techno-vampire]

That was AOL 5, IIRC. Gave us a lot of trouble, too, because even after you'd uninstalled it, you still couldn't resolve DNS. One of our techs finally found a way to fix it: you not only had to remove/reinstall DUN, you had to hand remove a number of the .386 files involved, and make sure that when you reinstalled, you did not keep the newer versions. From what I understand, the AOL techs warned that it wasn't ready for release, but the marketdroids insisted. As I said, AOL is constantly shooting itself in the foot.

Continued Subscription?

[oahazmatt]

'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"

You mean the continued subscription because AOL has a retention pool designed to endlessly throw offers and incentives (including months of free service, if necessary) to keep their customers?

I've known people who have had to report their Credit Card as lost to get out of paying for AOL.

Re:AOL "scam" e-mails

[History's Coming To]

If I had mod points you'd get an insightful for that.

Here in the UK I got a final demand, big red letters and everything, for about £12 from N-Power, a electricity supplier. Strangely, I didn't have an account with them. Reading the small print (very carefully) revealed that it was in fact a "final chance" to pay a £12 fee and have your power supply *switched* to N-Power. It's a despicable way to operate, and seemingly becoming more common.