Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evolving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Rules For the rest of the Site also accessible on the sidebar.
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Just saw that AOL is (finally) ending their dial-up in September this year. I think this will hit a lot of Boomers and they will end up losing their Internet unless they have a tech-savvy relative that can at least get them on a cell phone. Hopefully we don't lose many here.
Honestly I am surprised they still had it, but a LOT of seniors wanted to keep what they knew how to use. I know my Mom still had AOL email (though she had cable Internet) up until she died last year. I spent a month or 2 going through her 500k+ emails still in her AOL account - getting rid of all the fake political spam asking for donations, all her Fox News/Rumble/Newsmax/etc newsletters, and whittling it down to something I could work with. I was able to get actual emails and contacts so I could archive them and figure out all these friends and family members she talked with that I never met. I'm talking 4th/5th cousins and friends from 50 years ago she met in high school. Amazing.
AOL made it next to impossible to get all of this (especially contacts) but I was able to transfer it to my own IMAPS server (slowly). The contacts had to be pulled individually via browser - they only allow AOL users that pay a premium to download that in bulk. Ultimately I made scripts to print-to-pdf the email on my server, push them to Paperless so the OCR could render them to searchable text, tag them for future searches, and archived them. The searches were important so I could easily find stuff like any paid subscriptions, storage facilities, insurance, and other things I needed right away.
I posted this so people on here can check on their parents/grandparents to make sure they will still be able to get on the Internet after September, and to help them archive stuff before you have to blindly do it yourselves.
It's time this AOL scourge finally dies.
AOL still exist? Wow.. Remember the CDs they used to give away so you can install it on your computer, and that weird sound the device makes to go online- reminded me of alien contacts or something. And don't forget the AOL chat you can talk to your high school friends with. Sure brings back memories!
Speaking of memories, does anyone remember Geocities? And you can learn HTML and build your own webpage? lol
Geocities, Myspace, Prodigy, Compuserve, of course AOL - I used all of them for at least a little bit of time. A friend of mine was a sysadmin at AOL in the mid '90s. He kept putting me on the list to get those stupid discs mailed to me - as a joke. I had nearly 100 at one time. He made up for it by getting me an aol.net (not aol.com) email address while he still worked there.
I once got yelled at by a 2-star General for blocking Compuserve IP addresses from coming into the Pentagon. Turns out he was in Germany on temporary duty and that was how he was logging into our systems. I unblocked him and reported it up the chain so they knew why I unblocked something that shouldn't be. His (4-star) General told me to re-block it. Those were the days.
Oh gosh I remember AOL. It was the first internet we had at my house. Those were the days ❤️