Hopefully you've had a chance to try out some of the new features that let you personalize your home page. We wanted to let you how we store those preferences, so you can prevent the changes you've made to your home page from being lost. Any time you make changes to your home page, like adding sites to My Links, feeds to the RSS reader or choosing a theme, we store those preferences in a secure "cookie" on your computer. Basically, the cookie allows us to remember the changes you've made and deliver your home page to you the way that you want each time you go to AOL.com. We use cookies on AOL.com so that you are not required to login to the AOL network or even have an AOL screen name to be able to still use and save our personalization features.

We've received feedback from some you that the changes you've made have disappeared or didn't stick, and we understand how frustrating that would be since you invested the time to personalize.

What's happening in these circumstances is that your "cookies" are being deleted. Again, we use cookies to store your individual choices or preferences, so when that cookie is deleted the changes you've made to your home page get cleared away

However, there are ways that you can protect your cookies or private data. Sometimes your browser default settings might not allow cookies or could be set to delete your cookies every time you close it. But you can easily change your browser settings. Here's some information to help you check and update your browser settings.

Internet Explorer

To check your browser settings click click the "Alt" key and "T" keys simultaneously and your "Tools" menu should drop down from the top of your browser window automatically.

Then select "Internet Options" from the menu and then the "Privacy" tab.

If your settings are listed as Medium/High or higher, you may need to manually add AOL.com as a site from which you will allow cookies to save your settings. To add AOL.com, just click on the "Sites" button and then type www.aol.com in the input field then click "Allow". That's it.


If your Privacy settings are Medium or lower, you should not have to worry about losing your choices unless you manually choose to delete

Firefox

To check your browser settings click the "Alt" and "T" keys simultaneously and your "Tools" menu should drop down from the top of your browser window. Select "Options" from the menu and then select the "Privacy tab. ". Make sure that the checkboxes in the Cookies section are checked and that "Keep Until" is set as "until they expire".

Safari

For you Safari users, you can find similar setting by clicking Alt-E and then click on the "Security" tab. Make sure that the Accept Cookies setting is set to Always or Only from sites you navigate to (make sure its not set as Never).

If you are feeling very tech savvy, and you do want to delete cookies, you can go in and save the cookie named "uauserid". I'll spare you the details on how to do this as I have a feeling anyone who wants to venture down this path likely knows their way around pretty well already. If you do need help, please do drop us a comment here and we'll be sure to respond.


We are working on a solution that will let you bind your home page preferences to your AOL or potentially other external accounts, which we hope to release later this year. The benefit of this feature is that you can sign in to any computer at any time and have your home page reflect your preferences.

So, hopefully this information has helped. But if you still have issues or questions, there are some additional FAQs here or feel free to post of comment or send us feedback and we'll be sure to respond.