I am the product manager for AOL Journals. [...]Email sent:
Hi Christy,
Thanks for contacting me. It appears that links do work, now. Images are still blocked, but there are definitely valid reasons to do that.
Would it be possible to get an official statement from AOL about your (their?) policy on image loading? Or, if that’s too much trouble, could you point me at the relevant section of AOL’s TOS that explains why such a thing is happening? (Also, any similar information from other AOL-owned sites exhibiting the same behavior: Compuserve, Netscape.)
In particular, any information in those documents about why LiveJournal in particular was chosen would be very helpful.
Because we have been rewriting image links on LJ, our users have been able to load the images. When we flip the switch to retrieve images in the normal way again, a few thousand people’s images will suddenly break, and we’d like to have a resource to direct them to. (A contact address would be especially nice, but we could also just direct users to AOL support if you’d prefer that.)
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Evan Martin
LiveJournal.com