to try and demonstrate that aol users are not being specifically 'picked on'

Greg has the ability to 'ban' posters by IP address. When we had a spate of trolling a few months ago I helped investigate and we traced the majority of these posts to users with aol addresses. There are two reasons those aol addresses could not be added to the banned list.

1. IP addresses for aol users change with different timeslots (even if its only the last 3 digits)

2. Many regular users (yourself included) share those IP addresses that were used by the trolls

It is therefore not a case of what is and what is not allowed, its just that your IP address falls within those that need to be moderated.

The answer, as Gene said above, is ditch AOL