191–200 of 279 posts
Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of " http://www.nick.com ". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably G…
> Do people still type "www."? From my experience, yes. I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.
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Those numbers have to be very low now that we are post 2020.
I am an it professional. I've used qr codes maybe... 6 times, ever? With probably 50% success rate before I give up. I know for a fact that literally nobody else in my in law family of middle class Canadians has ever used a single one. Anecdata of course, but if we're sharing assumptions... :-)
Unfortunately this wasn't a legitimate support line. The person did fix their issue, but they also charged my grandparent-in-laws $250 for it.
They called me right after they paid the person, realizing their mistake immediately.
Anyone remember the first question their Tier-1 support would ask? "Do you own a computer?" This was due to the fact that most of the people who called for support didn't understand what a CD-ROM was, and tried playing it in their CD music players. That reminds me of one of the most popular questions in their chat rooms by the late 90's: "A/S/L?" While it did bleed over into other services, it was very AOL-centric. I…
A/S/L "Dox yourself please, and I might even hit on you as a bonus"
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> Do people still type "www."? From my experience, yes. I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).
If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.
Anyone remember the first question their Tier-1 support would ask? "Do you own a computer?" This was due to the fact that most of the people who called for support didn't understand what a CD-ROM was, and tried playing it in their CD music players. That reminds me of one of the most popular questions in their chat rooms by the late 90's: "A/S/L?" While it did bleed over into other services, it was very AOL-centric. I…
A/S/L "Dox yourself please, and I might even hit on you as a bonus"
I remember being in Yahoo chat rooms and my 11 year old logic was "I should lie and say I'm older...13 is old enough to be 'not a kid' right?"
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Really? I've been in the tech world for over a decade but think I've personally scanned only a single QR code in the wild. For people outside our bubble they basically don't exist, though I'll admit this is probably quite location dependant.
I’m sitting here eating a chicken katsu curry in London and each seat at the bar has a QR code to scan and see the menu. For the past 3 years a lot of restaurants switched to QR based menus for obvious reasons. So I’d wager to say that anyone that went out to eat in the last 3 years has interacted with at least a handful of QR scans :) I’ve also seen hotels adopt “scan this code to get our WI-FI details”. Which is a…
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AOL tried to spread the perception it was the internet and so should be the one chosing which internet resources were available for you. It wasn't really wasn't though. It was just a small walled garden in a bigger internet. Cloudflare on the otherhand, by it's sheer cheap utility, has inserted itself between a significant number of the top websites (and other internet services to a lesser extent) on the internet as…
Do you get blocked by Cloudflare a lot? My understanding is that they generally don't block traffic unless you look like a DDOS attack.