WebTV provides even less support and will not give you a reliable view of your highly sophisticated Future World site. WebTV is also incapable of properly using its many state-of-the-art features, such as the shopping cart, the encrypted credit card transmission system or the personalized clone site. It isn't just your Future World site that conflicts with WebTV's old browser technology. WebTV can't use any shopping cart or cgi-based features on the Net, at least not at this writing.

You can often resolve this conflict immediately by logging off the Net and logging nack on. You can permanently solve the problem by logging in with an ISP other than AOL or WebTV. However, even if you do nothing, this conflict appears to resolve itself as soon as the other user logs off or Site-Lock™ times out. Such conflicts are quite rare. Less than 50 instances were reported in all of 1998. All but two were with AOL and WebTV users. But, considering then hundreds of thousands of times Future World sites were accessed, the number of such conflicts are barely measurable.

This doesn't make a site conflict any less frustrating if it happens to you. But, it is important to understand that site conflicts only affect the two users who are temporarily in conflict. All the other millions of users on the World-Wide Web who visit your site will see it correctly, even if you are temporarily in conflict with another user.

Can the site conflict problem be fixed? After more than a year of research, our programmers doubt it, since it isn't a problem that our sites create. It also appears to be isolated to the two ISP's with all the other access problems we've discussed. The good news for AOL subscribers is that AOL recently purchased Netscape, an indication that they are tyring to update an improve an antiquated network of ISP's. The bad news is that it may still take months or years for you to see a resolution of the many problems that AOL subscribers continue to report with their servers.

So, if you only have AOL or WebTV and you don't seem to be able to view your site properly, don't assume that there is a problem with your site. There probably isn't. Instead, you'll want to visit your local public library or a local computer store to check out your Personalized Web site's many features using their Internet connection. (None of these locations will be using AOL or WebTV, for all the reasons we've mentioned and many more.) At your earliest convenience, you'll probably also want to change to a more reliable ISP as soon as possible. AOL and WebTV account for a very small percentage of Future World's subscribing Comms. But, they account for about 97% percent of all reported site problems.

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