AOL Problem Connecting to Website

[Mack Lundy]

Last week I posted a message regarding problems connecting to our library
catalog from an AOL account.  Our web interface is Sirsi's Webcat.  Since
then, I have been told that AOL users have been experiencing problems on the
College's home page as well as the library catalog page.  Three kind souls
tried to search our catgalog and all bombed out when clicking on the Library
Catalog icon.

I talked with the AOL helpdesk this afternoon.  On a Macintosh using the
latest version of the AOL software (2.7) AOL was unable to acess our catalog.

Under Windows, clicking on the Library Catalog icon gave an "unable to
retrieve" message initially but subsequently clicking on Reload took the
user to the next level.

AOL didn't have an explanation for the problem.  I was told that a future
version of their software will support a telnet session so users can come in
via a character session.  Also a future version of the software gets around
the problem of web pages customized for specific browsers like Netscape.

Unrelated to this problem, I was also told that AOL doesn't like a trailing
/ in a URL.

About all we can do is tell our AOL users that it is a known problem but not
one that we can do anything about at our end.

Thanks to all who helped.

Mack

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Mack A. Lundy III			e-mail:  mack at mail.swem.wm.edu
Library Systems Manager			voice:   804.221.3114
Swem Library				fax:     804.221.2635
College of William and Mary
P.O. Box 8795
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795