Developers and programmers (I do the front desk sort of stuff in the Discord chat, and in re-AOL chatrooms when I see that there’s a need for it, like helping people download and install the client, answering questions, getting answers to questions, facilitating conversation, the whole nine) have been working on some back-end fixes to problems like “hanging SNs” — where, after disconnecting, it would still say that you “were logged in”, which a mod could fix by booting your screen name off so that you could actually log in yourself — and the occasional doubling up of screen names in the People In Room list. We still have… screen names that do that, but the things I’ve mentioned are already happening less than they were, which is awesome! And there’s the occasional “missing line”, where when someone tries to send something to a re-AOL chat it just doesn’t send, but that’s happening less than it was. (Later, we’re going to get Slingo and Splatterball!)

This is the fun of alpha testing, though. And programming during the alpha stage, too. We squash bugs.

Sometimes the randomly generated Guest screen names are amusing. I try hard to screenshot them.

Anyway…

As always, a lot of work gets done behind the scenes by devs (developers) to improve re-AOL’s stability and security, which directly translates to more people being able to enjoy using it, the chat rooms functioning better, Instant Messenges functioning better, the whole nine. One of the developers has been working hard on bringing us Slingo, though! In before a lot of the people reading this post go nuts, though: that’s the slots and bingo — portmanteau — that a lot of us who used this version, and subsequent versions, of America Online grew up playing because the only place that you could play it for the longest time… wait for it… was America Online. And man oh man, growing up did I love me some Slingo. I am going to love playing it again on re-AOL when Tommy brings it back for us. I savor the nostalgic experience of being able to play one of my favorite online games on something that I grew up with. You literally can not beat that, folks. Any of that.

We’ve opened up registration to more people! But before I get any further into that…

I am now the official help desk (“onboarding manager”) for re-AOL! This makes me a member of the staff, although I do stress as needed that I am not a developer or moderator. I’m responsible for introducing people to the Discord server when they make themselves known as a new presence, pointing them in the direction of installing the re-AOL client and helping them out with it if my assistance is necessary, helping them through the rest of the steps on the server (reserving screen names as re-AOL allows more and more people to register), and generally being the Help Desk™. I love this server, and I love these people. I grew up with a lot of these people. I love being able to hang with the homies and being able to do something this productive!

https://www.patreon.com/re_aol

Glad to see that the developers (or whoever is in charge of this, I think it’s a developer and someone who is taking time out to manage the Patreon, so props to that) have fixed the tiers on the re-AOL Patreon! I’ve watched them… do this through all stages of development and am now glad that it is fully functional, so if you want to donate to the head developer’s server costs and help re-AOL become the best that it can be, please consider doing so. A lot of back-end and stability updates have been done, to include making it so that the introductory guest message no longer “hangs” (as before, you had to wait until it “timed out” before you could click away from it, go to People Connection, and go about your business exploring the program). You can also turn Instant Messages off with $IM_OFF, and back on with $IM_ON if that suits your fancy, which has always been one of my favorite features of… well, America Online, and was something that I frequently used myself as an adolescent and young adult. If I needed to turn messages off to do homework for middle school, high school, or college, I did, or if I just needed some time to myself, I did that too. So it was great that this feature has been added into re-AOL, and as always, I continue to give the developers props for all of their hard work. Much love to these hard-working folks! They’re letting our re-live our younger years!