AOL IP addresses

[XMENPorsche]

I need to find an easy way to tell which IP address ranges are used by AOL. At my other board we had banned some people by IP address. We found out later on that these users were using AOL. This has caused some problems for some of our other users. I need to see if I can identify which IP addresses belong to AOL so I can unban them.

Thanks!

[XMEN Gambit]

Here are some answers I found. Nothing easy, of course...

I have a website via AOL hometown and have a guest book with some vile messages. AOL users have left the messages and I thought I knew who it was based on a previous message by the same person. The Ip's matched and now I'm told that they could match with just about anyone on AOL.<BR>
AOL is a problem in that their network is mostly isolated from the internet and nowhere near 100% compatible with internet standards. The ip addresses you have are probably addresses of proxy servers. These proxy servers act on behalf of a client to make a connection with a server, the server mostly being a web server. IMO, as a result of this isolation/incompatibility, AOL have for a long time used it as a selling point: privacy of its users. It is IMO extremely difficult to trace people on aol, though not impossible. I personally was driven to track down an aol user and ended up with their home address. This took me about 6 months on and off, required some patience, skill, experience, tidbits of information and mostly luck. I am not stating that it will take you 6 months but I think you should ask yourself: how much do I really need to know where they are? Are my feelings hurt by what was in the content or is it a threat to me or other people in the real world? Not wanting to directly insult you, but your website is on AOL downtown, are you really taking your website seriously?

If you choose to attempt to trace them here are some ideas and links to get you started:
Make a complaint to AOL themselves. They must have records of who the user is. Its not clear if you yourself use AOL to get connected but if you do, it would probably add weight to your complaint.
Try google. Finding ip addresses of AOL people is a common topic. I remember when I was looking there is at least one commercial offering for finding AOL ip addresses (I dont mean the net detective type software that just provides you with (mostly) free information you can get anyway)
Heres a link that might give you some more ideas: http://www.pimall.com/nais/nl/n.aolid.html

Also, Wikipedia has a page that might be helpful. There's actually some IP ranges in it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... OL_vandals