AOL Gold: Lustrous or tarnished?

[Rewind]

We have used AOL since 1995. Yes, I admit it. For the past month, every time we signed on we got a message saying the current version of AOL, 9.8.2, is being discontinued and urging us to upgrade to AOL Gold.

Some of my wife's friends upgraded to AOL Gold and they hate it. They complain that it's slow and they complain that they can't open files. Online -- look it up -- there are many more complaints from various users, e.g., emails are blank, the e-mail screen is smaller and has huge ads at the sides, mail waiting to be sent disappears, copy-and-paste will not work and only 15 fonts remain for email, when there used to be more than 200.

On October 27 we were unable to sign on to AOL. Tech support had told us AOL 9.8.2 would not be discontinued until December 31 and they were wrong. We now had no choice but to install AOL Gold. It is not as horrible as we expected it would be. Most of the changes are minor. But the spell-check function cannot be disabled. I do a lot of writing and I hate the wiggly red lines that appear beneath surnames, city names, radio/tv call letters, foreign words and anything else that the program thinks is not a real word that can be found in a small dictionary.

If anyone here has AOL Gold, I would love to hear how you like it -- or dislike it.

[Rewind]

Today I got this notice:

"Effective November 30, 2017, AOL will no longer offer the ability to add new usernames or restore deleted usernames to an account. Rest assured, no changes will be made to any active usernames on the account."

Right now there can be as many as seven different screen names on a single account. Why is AOL changing so many features that don't need to be changed? Verizon and AOL are now part of a company known as Oath. I imagine when people see all the horrible changes AOL is making, they'll let loose with a lot of oaths.

I repeat: If anyone here has AOL Gold, I would love to hear how you like it -- or dislike it.

[Penguin]

I have AOL Gold but I kept the older version of AOL because I have heard so many bad things about Gold and I'm glad I did. With the old version, I can open all my saved files but in AOL Gold none of them will open. The menu doesn't even have an "Open" option. I also hate that most of the fonts are gone and when I open an e-mail the right side of it is covered up by advertising and I have to stretch the screen out to read it.

[Rewind]

Yep. And the email screen displays new mail in the Times New Roman font and there is no way to change it to the much-easier-to-read Arial font. I can still use Arial when I write email but the letters are now thicker and darker, almost like boldface, and the spacing between lines is much narrower. So many of the changes are for the worse!

[Penguin]

Something else I just found, you can't add icons to the toolbar. When you try, you just get a tiny screen that says "Coming soon." They should not have released AOL Gold until they fixed all the problems.

[Penguin]

I noticed something else about AOL Gold. There is still a spam folder but it is always empty. When I open my e-mail, there are dozens of ads for weight loss pills, erectile dysfunction drugs, dating sites, credit cards, etc. They used to go directly to the spam folder but now they don't. Didn't AOL say many years ago they were going to get rid of most of those ads?

[Rewind]

Well, I've had AOL Gold for a month and the problems Penguin mentioned have still not been fixed. Trying to add an icon to the toolbar still brings up the "Coming soon" message and all those junky spam ads continue to appear on the main email screen and never in the spam folder. Sometimes an email will not open and I get a message, "We are unable to open email. Try again in five minutes." And I haven't yet found a way to restore the hundreds of fonts that disappeared.

Here is a website filled with complaints about AOL Gold:

https://aol.pissedconsumer.com

[Rewind]

Several new mobile messaging apps hastened its demise.

RIP AIM: AOL Instant Messenger is gone

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techno...D=ansmsnnews11

[Penguin]

I am having another problem with AOL Gold. When I have a lot of e-mail, sometimes the screen freezes when I read one e-mail and I have to close it and open it again to read the next one. When I delete e-mail, the same thing happens.

[Penguin]

I just noticed something else that has changed with AOL Gold. If I go to a website and click the red heart so I can add a shortcut to the toolbar, there are no longer any icons to choose from. I have to keep whatever icon AOL gives me and there is no way to change it. Also there still a LOT of ads on the e-mail screen, and a lot of the news stories are not really news, just dumb things like celebrity gossip, weight loss advice, housecleaning tips, stories about old TV shows, etc.