Confused about AOL's IP

I just read that all the users of AOL share the same IP. What IP is that? What if I block several IPs and in one of them I block the one of AOL, would this mean that no one using AOL would be able to reach my site?

 

when ever I get an AOL user, they are always using 1 or more proxies.
(ie. cache-los-aa06.proxy.aol.com = 195.93.21.6) but I think a company like AOL has so many IP's it would be impossible to make an accurate list of it.

but 195.93.0.0/17 is assigned to AOL International Operations, Europe

 

if you use a program like liveperson???? (forgot the name) you can view all IP's watching your site. When someone from AOL comes on - everypage they view gets accessed by a seperate IP. All other visitor just has one IP and moves to each page

 

Simple = Don't use aol

 

It depends how specific you get. If you stop block, 123.456.xxx.xxx, then you are clearly going to cut out a huge amount of user traffic. If you get specific and block, 123.456.789.00x, then you're wasting your time if it is AOL since they usually assign dynamic urls. I think you would have to locate the entire url range used by AOL in order not to unwittingly freeze out AOL users.

 

Aol uses proxies, so if you block the AOL proxies aol users would be blocked from your site.

 

That's what I am asking, what are those proxies? Is there like a list of them to check I aren't blocking them?

 

not that I know of , though you could check if your ip's are in blocks assigned to AOL and/or do revese lookups on them.

 

See http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html and http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/pdf/chapter5/5.22c.pdf

But why do you want to block AOL? Like it or not, AOL has a LOT of customers - that's a helluva lot of potential customers for you.

 

Not at all, what I want to make sure is that I am not blocking them

 

Ah, I see... that makes more sense

By the way:

"I don't know why I'm pregnant"???

 

huh?

 

I speak some French but virtually no Spanish - just taking a wild "Franish" guess at the translation of the title of the song in tour "Listening to"

 

lol

It means "I wonder why"

 

Oh. So "pregunto" has nothing to do with pregnancy...

I was pretty close, though...

 

Blocking an IP becomes important when you ban someone from a forum. If they use AOL - you basically cant ban them permanantly.

 

It certainly makes it more difficult to identify them when they try to re-register. Then again, it usually doesn't take long until they are revealed through their posts...