go to AOL keyword :member report. there it will tell you about it. click the thing at the bottom and it will automatically DL to your computer and the next time you use your browser no more pop ups.
and no parental controls dont work very well, the best protection is the watchful eye of a parent. moving the computer to a more "public" area of the house does work. of course you CAN set their SN up to accept no IMs PERIOD, people complain about those more than pop ups. i have mine blocked from everyone except those on my buddy list and i get ZERO spams via IM. the only thing left for me is to block everyone from my email except those i list but since i with a couple of g-body groups and the email comes from the member through the group i'd have to add a bunch of people to a list and i'll probably miss someone and then i'll get complaints on emails bouncing and its a big headache at the moment so i just do the "report and block" method for the moment.
aol is slowly getting better but they still need to keep people from scanning all the rooms for SNs to spam with IMs and emails.
lately however there has been a new breed of spammer. the bot. similar to yahoos problem this bot stays in the room and instead of putting a link in the room (a violation of TOS) they instead give you this impression they are a part of some conversation in the room and make remarks suggesting you to look at their profile. of course the link is in the profile, no violation there so they are within the rules of TOS for AOL and AOL cant do diddly with them. even if they get rid of the bot its only temporary and another one replaces it soon after the first one is booted. this isnt a rampant problem yet but im sure as more and more spammers catch on this will become a probklem so great that you'll have upwards of 5 or more bots in every room taking up space and basically annoying the hell out of you. you can manually ignore them but that doesnt solve the problem that REAL customers are being kept out of certain rooms because they are full because of spammers bots.
personally i dont understand why they blindly send emails and IMs to everyone saying something like "hi i'm an 18 y/o female and my panties keep falling off". every single person who has a computer knows where to find porn so its not like these people need to do much advertising. good sites dont need to advertise, whther they be porn or a more family friendly site, word of mouth usually carries better than a spam someone is going to delete ASAP without even thinking about it.
nothing would giev me more pleasure than to find the people who spam me and beat every last one of them to a bloody pulp and send them to the hospital in a coma. they are wasting large amounts of server space in the hopes that 1 in 10 thousand people they spam will look at their site which in turn costs us more money in the long run. it ruins or seriously diminishes any fun you would be having. instead you spend your time deleting emails you dont want, deleting IMs you dont want, ignoring SNs telling you to "click here! live cam action!" and its getting worse every year, every month every week it gradually gets worse and worse.
porn site owners, hackers wanting your account info so they can mes with your account because they are complete losers, all wanting you to click here and people are actually dumb enough to click it. and thats why people get spammed so much, because it works, if it didnt then it wouldnt happen. delet it, report it, block it ignore it. if everyone did those four things spamming would go down dramatically but it wont, there are teenage boys instead of looking for it on their own click on that crap and its not always to a porn site! remember people there are hackers who do the same thing in the hopes they can get your ISP address and DESTROY your PC via the phonecord, steal any credit card info you have on the computer, your personal info. UL a virus or prog designed to give them every password to every site you go to so they can wreak havoc on you.