OSW priceless, AOL worthless
Techies get frustrated by technology, too.
AOL blocks access to my client’s website.
Update (2009-07-22): AOL resolved the issue. The OSW website is no longer blocked thanks to AOL’s superb employee Mark G. (New blog post about that to be written soon.)
The Optical Shop of Westport (OSW) is a high-end optical boutique that features prescription glasses, sunglasses, sports eyewear and fashion accessories. They are a client. I have been designing the OSW website, setting up their email services and getting them ready to add electronic marketing for their fashion eyewear and fantastic customer service.
The owner of the store is not computer savvy. She is a longtime AOL customer. She uses AOL dialup in the store for Internet Access and email. In the past she had limited need for the Internet so AOL dialup was adequate.
The first time I sent her the links to the new website she complained that she could not access the site but got error messages instead. Error messages like this:
This was my first encounter with a 50x server error. I did not understand. I had already tested the site in every major browser, on every Windows OS, on Mac OS X, at several client locations and my own facility, all without issue. I could not reproduce her problem.
So I set up a Windows XP virtual machine, signed up for an AOL account, installed AOL 9.1, signed in and tried surfing to http://opticalshopofwestport.com.
Bingo, I got the same error message. Oddly, when I signed out of my AOL account but still used the AOL browser I could surf to the OSW site. The AOL 9.1 browser is based on Microsoft Internet Explorer. So the AOL browser is not the issue. Something else is. The block must come directly from AOL filtering the Internet. Sign back in and I get the 50x server error. Unfortunately OSW is restricted in-store because they use AOL as their ISP.
After much head scratching and frustration I tracked down the problem to the fact that AOL is not a normal ISP but rather an extended intranet that limits what its subscribers can access. AOL censors the Internet for its customers. I suspect that they don’t know this.
I tried contacting AOL to get this fixed. AOL has not responded.
I submitted the OSW site URL to various search engines in the hope that would rectify the problem. It hasn’t.
Most of you can see the OSW site by going to http://opticalshopofwestport.com except for those of you who use AOL. Here is a screen capture of the home page for you unfortunate AOLers.
I am hopeful that I can convince OSW’s owner that the time to change from AOL is upon us. I think that an AT&T DSL connection will be perfectly adequate for OSW’s needs.
AOL is not long for this world. They are bleeding subscribers. Rightfully so. They cannot go out of business soon enough for me.
Update: TechCrunch article about Tim Armstong, AOL’s new CEO and the task ahead.
AOL truly is the worst thing going in major interwebby companies
I’ve written a bit about this in the past (you used to be able to find related articles on my blog under the tag “aol proxy servers” but I deleted that tag for some reason – so I need to restore it). AOL *does* cache the Internet – and so they have the ability to filter out websites for anyone using the client-side software. I’ve argued with people who work for AOL who claim I’m overstating the extent of it but I’m probably not. My only question, in this particular case, is with one portion of the error message which says, “…or the request timed out waiting for a response”. Any chance the website loads so slowly that on AOL dial-up it simply times out? Did you ever try to reproduce the error on a dial-up connection?
@Marah Marie
This is not a dialup issue as I have a fast connection, 30+Mbps down/5+Mbps up, where I tested and recreated the issue.
I will be blogging about a call I had from AOL, yesterday. They confirmed that they had blacklisted the server’s IP address, not the domain, but the IP address. They have resolved the issue.
I’d love to see the new post…