AOL are you listening?

   You know, the most disturbing thing about the ordeal Armand has gone through is not the fact that AOL made a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes, it's called being human.
   It's not even the apparent inability to get the journal back, although that sounds awfully fishy to me. Anybody who has spent a little while working with computers knows that the delete command doesn't actually delete anything. It just tells the File Allocation Table to make that space available for future use. The data stored there isn't actually erased until something else is written over top of it, and that doesn't happen right away. The computer industry coined the term, "undelete." Ignoring that, AOL has huge back-up servers where copies of every piece of user data is kept against the possibility of a massive, catastrophic failure of their primary servers. Armand's journal is still stored somewhere in the bowels of the leviathan that is AOL. If he pushes hard enough, he'll get it all back. (Armand, try the national newspapers).
   No, the most disturbing thing about the whole situation is the way the journal was deleted without any communication with the user. Without any process allowing the user to argue his case. "Oops, we made a mistake. Oh well, you still lose." That is unacceptable from a company the size of AOL.
   What should have happened is this: the user should have received an email notifying him he was in contravention of the Terms Of Service agreement, and giving him a set period of time to rectify the contravention. Or, in the case of Armand, to reply, saying, "what contravention?" That e-mail should have been sent to the screen name responsible for the problem, and the master screen name of the account.
   If this set period of time, perhaps three to five business days, passed without reply or correction on the part of the user, the journal should have been copied to a back-up server specifically dedicated to these kinds of issues. That way, the journal could be taken down, but still be available for restoration should the user reply eventually, and the situation be rectified in the future. Now, AOL should not have to wait forever for the user to reply, but I don't think thirty days is an unreasonable period of time to wait. What if the userhas gone on vacation, and isn't checking his e-mail? What if the user's own computer failed, preventing him from accessing the Internet? There are any number of legitimate reasons why a user might not reply within three to five days.
   I have no problem with AOL weilding the big stick on people who willingly and knowingly break the rules. People who store porn on thier ftp space, or use their journals to promote hatred and discrimination should be dealt with swiftly and strongly. But a user whose journal is reported for a link to something that another user finds offensive cannot just be pulled without a significant amount of deliberation. To me, Armands story says that someone who works for AOL didn't want to spend the time reading through his journal looking for a reported offense. Someone couldn't be bothered, and just pulled the plug, instead of actually doing their job. And that has to never happen again.
   AOL, are you listening?