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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.'"
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.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
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.
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