And Now I Know How I Ended Up in Membership Hell.

Re the pre­vi­ous two posts.

As I men­tioned ear­lier today, there’s more than one thing hinky about one of the local TV station’s web­site. I now know exactly how I got myself stuck in mem­ber­ship hell. Fol­low along:

• open your favorite browser.
• go to www.king5.com
• enter a search like, say, “one car”
• enter another, “two trucks”
• another, “three buses”
• another, “four boats”
• another, “five bikes”
• another, “one more than I’m allowed”

oops… mem­ber­ship hell page.

• press the back­space key, nope still here
• click on your browser’s back but­ton, nope still here

(You can escape by using the list of recently vis­ited pages next to your back button.)Are you think­ing what I’m thinking?

That’s right, you can only search for five things or search for one thing in five ways before they cut you off and try to make you sign up on the “mem­ber­ship” page.

You can try clos­ing the browser tab and open­ing a new one it but it won’t help. You can try clos­ing your browser and ope­ing a new one. It won’t help. You can try open­ing a dif­fer­ent browser (like IE7 instead of Fire­fox) This will help. You now get five more searches and then it’s… back to the mem­ber­ship hell page.

If all this open­ing and clos­ing and switch­ing brands of browsers is mak­ing you crazy and you use Fire­fox 2.x I can help you out. Go to the top menu bar:

• click on Tools=>Option,
• click on the Show Cook­ies but­ton in the Cook­ies section,
• Scroll down to the lit­tle folder that says king5.com,
• high­light the lit­tle folder and,
• click Remove Cookies.

You now get another five searches before you’re sent back to…

Lest you folks over at KING5 think I’m pick­ing on you… (I am.) I think I’ll have a lit­tle lunch and then wan­der around the neigh­bor­hood (medi­a­wise) and see what some of your neigh­bors are up to.