If you know where the damn page is this time, let us know – leave a comment!
It’s perfectly bizarre to check your stats maybe once a month like I do and expect to see the normal 100-200 visitors a day but instead see there’s been almost 1600 – in under 36 hours. I mean, I don’t even update this thing. Even more bizarre? Looking at both referrer and search term stats, I can’t figure out where the heck ya’ll are coming from, but I’m uh…in shock that you went and found me, regardless.
Missing in action: an entire AOL home page. Whoops!
It’s suddenly become as contagious as a rash for people to find AOL’s Classic home page, so, to judge by my stats, which are positively smothered in search terms such as “aol classic”, “classic aol homepage”, “http://www.aol.com/?backtoclassic”, “aol classic homepage”, “http://www.aol.com/?src=classic”, “back to classic aol homepage”, and “aol.com-classic”, I’ll assume that’s what most of you are after.
Here, let me make it easier on ya’ll – you’re welcome!
The AOL Classic home page is gone. Yessiree. Again. In honor of the amount of visits I’m getting – 125 an hour, which is a lot for this stupid blog – I’ve looked around the wild and wooly interwebs figuring it’s somewhere (and knowing AOL’s devs, it’s either live or on their Intranet, but still kickin’ around) but I can’t find a working link to it just yet. AOL waved their super-secret magic wand to make go poof! sometime yesterday, August 25th, according to Google’s last cache of aol.com, but put no new link in place that anyone can find to restore the Classic look for their apparently very loyal users.
FYI: this link will no longer give you the Classic look: http://www.aol.com/?src=classic. The link works, but brings you to that artsy-fartsy bullshit AOL has in place now. I even ran the link through this tool to make sure there were no cloaked 301 redirects in place, but there’s not. The only redirect AOL has in place is for the non-www version of that page, which permanently points to the www version. If anyone knows how to get to AOL’s Classic home page, please let us know!
Thank you for info and POSTIN!! I have tried the link to go back, that AOL sent me a year ago,that I saved on my computer, but that link, like you said doesn’t work anymore. I ‘ve tried System Restore, but not getting old version of AOL screen!! I’ll keep working and trying to get AOL old screen back!! Thanks again, for posting info!! Regards Dan.
You’re welcome, Dan, and thank you for becoming a subscriber. System Restore won’t restore the old version of the AOL Welcome screen or the Classic version of the home page that you see within AOL’s software once you sign on (editor’s note: in this case, Dan is most likely referring to the Classic home page seen in the AOL software itself after he signs on to AOL). Apparently (to judge by what I’ve seen in Google) AOL changed the home page seen in the AOL software for most (if not all) versions of AOL software starting around a year ago, and there is no way that I know of to make it display the classic start page again – but again, if anyone has any helpful tips in regard to that, I’ll be glad to hear them.