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.