November, 2005 : The Repertory has now over 197,000 groups and has been completely updated.
February, 2005 : The Repertory has now over 185,000 groups and has been completely updated.
August 25, 2004 : Major Messages Access speed increase
February 21, 2004 : Photos & Files Access technology has been revised to keep in sync with Yahoo.
October 20, 2003 : An improved system and interface has been activated.
October 11, 2003: The Repertory has now over 145,000 groups and has been completely updated.
September 5, 2003: FAQ: Yahoo Changes Our Groupsboxes and Other Questions.
August 7, 2003: New Membership Packages.
August 2, 2003: We immediately start to redesign and reinvent ourselves to adapt to the needs of our members after the Yahoo changes.
August 1, 2003: Yahoo announces they will no longer archive groups after August 20 (previously August 6), but will keep external html links.
July 7, 2003: The Repertory has now over 120,000 groups and has been completely updated.
June 25, 2003: The Repertory, now with over 100,000 groups, has been completely updated.
May 24, 2003: We begin work on a major renovation of the fast access system and quotas management
May 14, 2003: MAJOR UPDATE: The Repertory, now with over 100,000 groups, has been completely updated.
April 25, 2003: In our Meta-Archive, groups starting with numbers are now available.
March 17, 2003: The repertory jumped from 20,000 groups to over 60,000!
March 17, 2003: The repertory now lists entries in an order giving precedence to groups with lots of recent activity. The search engine has also been improved overall.
March 13, 2003: MAJOR FEATURE ADDED: It is now possible to fetch from international groups!
March 8, 2003: Our in-process optimizations of the main system should result in faster response times.
February 23, 2003: The repertory has been completely updated. More than 4,000 new groups have been added.
February 6, 2002: The Album Fetch feature has been improved to return the full size version of the pictures.
February 6, 2002: The Discard Request button has been fixed.
February 3, 2002: We started work on optimizations of the main system which will result in even faster response times.
February 3, 2002: Album Fetch has been repaired. A change in Yahoo caused it not to fetch from certain groups for the past two or three days.
January 29, 2002: We're now working on a system that will give feedback while you are are fetching.
January 21, 2002: The repertory has been completely updated. More than 3,000 new groups have been added.
January 7, 2003: A minor glitch in the tour has been fixed.
December 27, 2002: Date and subject fields have been added under the fetched pictures.
November 30, 2002: Album Fetch has been repaired. A small bug prevented it to fetch from certain groups.
November 19, 2002: One of our crucial servers has been memory upgraded to improve the overall speed of the service.
November 7, 2002: The repertory has been completely updated. More than 1,500 new groups have been added.
October 20, 2002: Album Fetch has now been activated in its beta version. Please report any weird behavior to us. If you get no pictures from an album that has pictures, a second or third fetch should work. This is because Yahoo temporarily disables groups for a few seconds for god knows what.
October 16, 2002: Additional advanced features, including Album Fetch, will be activated this weekend. We welcome comments on the currently activated new features. Is the interface clear? Is there an obvious functionality missing?
October 12, 2002: New features activated under Advanced Fetch button. You get the active range of messages for the selected group. Our updated controller for fetches is much more flexible and easier to use.
October 10, 2002: We'll be introducing part of our new features this weekend in their beta version. They will be available under the button Advanced Fetch. We'll need your suggestions, comments, and your general help for that debugging period.
October 2, 2002: NEW FEATURES A FEW DAYS AWAY! Full group info and download history, Photo and File sections download.
September 20, 2002: Well advanced on new Fall features! Full group info and download history, Photo and File sections download.
September 18, 2002: (5:30 PM EST) We've just made a miracle improvement to our system in terms of speed. Now, fetches of 30 messages take about the same time as a 5 message fetch!
September 17, 2002: Yahoo was a bit slow today for certain groups. It seemed group-dependent.
September 13, 2002: Our group repertory has been completely updated with new information. More than 3,000 new groups have been added.
September 7, 2002: Yahoo altered the behavior of the login process, so we had to adapt our system. If all your groups return messages 1-5 empty instead of the requested range, we know how to fix it quickly. E-Mail us at support@grandindulgences.com. We are working on an automatic solution to this problem.
August 25, 2002: We finished implementing our way to improve the general speed of the system. Now, when Yahoo is on its best behavior, a 5 message fetch can take as little as 6 seconds. Of course, if Yahoo is slower or for a larger number of messages, this can increase to 60 - 120 seconds, but most time-outs problems are eliminated.
August 19, 2002: We discovered a way to improve general speed of the system in a major way.
August 4, 2002: We improved the system's tolerance to passwords and messages 1-5.
August 1, 2002: Update your group list frequently, especially if you start getting empty pages from groups, or if we show only messages 1-5 instead of the highest messages. There is a button just below your groups box for that. This is caused by groups changing their names, or disappearing. In rare cases, groups change the case of some of the letters in their names, like HotCOWBOYS to Hotcowboys. If you know of a group that displays empty pages for messages that you know has pictures in them on Yahoo, tell us the name of the group so that we can update it.
July 31, 2002: Great News! We just updated our network cards and the improvements are obvious: 1) You should no longer be asked for your password right in the middle of a session; 2) Major Speed Improvements!
July 30, 2002: It is now possible to delete those pesky requests that just would not go away. Use the Delete Request(s) button as usual but with better results.
July 27, 2002: PicsFetch! is now 1 year old! Happy birthday!
July 21, 2002: We are currently setting up our priorities for improvements to our system, and we'd like you to send us your suggestions. Is there some little annoying thing you'd like us to improve, or some major feature you'd like us to add? This is the time to tell us, as we are preparing for big changes for the fall.
July 15, 2002: Fortunately, the recent Yahoo changes turned out to have no effect on our system. We fixed some minor glitches here and there, and have a few more to fix, but nothing major was discovered.
July 12, 2002: Yahoo made some changes to their system recently, and we are working to update our system accordingly.
February 16, 2002: You can now make multiple selections in the requests list to see, delete or re-fetch several requests at once. Use shift-click, or whatever your browser requires.
February 16, 2002: You can now fetch requests again if you think they have not been properly fetched, as when the ads were blocking some pictures from showing, or when new messages have appeared in the range. Be careful with this, as all the ranges are shared among members, and you may make some other member wait again.
February 14, 2002: Some members may have experienced difficulties loging in today, as we were often down for program new features, and Yahoo was also down some of the time.
February 7, 2002: We are rebuilding the repertory from scratch because of many changes in groups. If you do not get any results from your searches, this is why. It will be back in a few days.
February 2, 2002: We have now fixed the advertisement messages again. Because some of you may have missed pictures in your past fetches, we added a "Messages With Ads Only" checkbox to fetch only those messages in the range you choose. You can thus quickly refetch your recent ranges to check if you missed anything. They will be dealt with in a few days, although new ones will be ok unless already fetched by another member.
January 29, 2002: We have optimized the system to download more requests at one time. In a few days, the backlog of requests should have been fulfilled.
January 28, 2002: This afternoon and early evening, the system was down due to a database corruption, which was fully fixed.
January 21, 2002: When some pics show up as red X's in ready requests, it means that the group reached a quota limit as the request is being fulfilled. Sometimes this happens if you go beyond the last messages in the group.
January 18, 2002: Two more improvements: users can now request more than 30 messages; also, no more lost pics in messages with advertisements. Yahoo is still playing around with those ads, so the last situation may recur. If any of you suspect that we are skipping pics again because of advertisements, please contact us.
January 17, 2002: We started work on a new set of features which should prove immensely useful for all of you. In a few weeks, you won't believe how much we've expanded!
January 17, 2002: Although the system works properly in almost all cases, some minor bugs proved more stubborn than others, including those awful advertisements. Our expert on such matters is coming back tonight and will work to settle these once and for all.
January 14, 2002: Because a major feature was long delayed, we are adding one week membership to all members who joined before or on January 7. Please be aware that this is not because we had to alter features to adapt to Yahoo: we are not responsible for what Yahoo makes or does not make available. But we're taking responsibility for major features we promised at a certain date and did not deliver at that time.
January 14, 2002: We are attacking pervasive bugs today: one that does not download certain requests properly (pictures show up as red X's) and the other that has trouble with pages with advertisements on Yahoo (1 in 5, about). If you are experiencing these bugs, they'll be fixed soon.
January 10, 2002: We have to ask our members to please bear with us as we continue all day today the activation of the most complex features we've offered to date.
January 9, 2002: Since we are activating new features, you may find some strange behavior. Please wait at least 12 hours before reporting it, as we may well be working on it, unless it is completely preventing you from using our service.
January 9, 2002: We've activated a very fast login and get groups. All logins after the next login will not require you to enter your Yahoo info, and your groups will appear very quickly. Try logging in twice to see!
January 6, 2002: The new features require huge disk space to temporarily hold pictures. A hardware problem at our host has delayed the expected new features launch to Wednesday. You'll see that it will be well worth the wait.
January 4, 2002: Last tests for new features. We're trying to go public over the weekend.
January 3, 2002: We start updating members profiles.
December 16, 2001: We put emphasis on our development of a new member profile which remembers groups and fetches.
December 13, 2001: Between December 1 and December 13, we got more new members and/or renewals than in any prior period of the same length.
December 12, 2001: We are working hard on the infrastructure for groups tracking and groups fastload. It will be a major improvement.
December 10, 2001: PicsFetch! was down from 17:30 to 21:30 EST because of a problem at our service provider. Although we are usually pretty reliable, even 1-2% downtime can seem like an eternity for members. We are looking for ways to minimize those rare but still annoying interruptions.
December 10, 2001: Our service provider warned us of a possible 30 minutes downtime this week for maintenance.
December 9, 2001: We found that since Yahoo made some changes last week, downloading the groups list is slower, especially when you have thousands of groups. We are currently implementing a fast groups list download, which should be ready by Saturday. In the meantime, if you know the exact group name you are fetching from, you can use the link on the members password page for a quick fetch.
December 7, 2001: New server added, with three times the capacity of the previous one.
December 5-6, 2001: Occasionally bizarre behavior appeared that day as Yahoo made changes to their interface (to prepare to transfer Yahoo Clubs to Yahoo Groups).
December 1, 2001: Repertory of over 10,000 adult groups added to PicsFetch!.
November 22, 2001: New server purchased in anticipation of new features. Server to be activated December 7.
November 3, 2001: Repertory basic structure completed.
October 28, 2001: Tour which demonstrates our capabilities is merged with simulation.
October 22, 2001: New look goes online, including a much bigger support section.
October 14, 2001: Yahoo down from 1 AM to 9 AM EST.
October 14, 2001: Stats indicate that only 12% of members requests result in a quota exceeded message.
October 11, 2001: We move to a new server with twice the speed and three times the memory of the previous one.
October 4, 2001: We purchase the domain picsfetch.com and change our service name to PicsFetch! to account for our more global philosophy.
September 30, 2001: Enormous load on our server makes us disable the trial temporarily and decide to move to a new one. We get past the 1,000 members mark.
September 15, 2001: We start working on a full set of new features.
September 9, 2001: We get past the 500 members mark.
September 8, 2001: We introduce features to start at the latest messages and go backwards.
August 21, 2001: 1 million messages successfully fetched by members since the beginning.
August 21, 2001: We activate a new dedicated server.
August 17, 2001: Several new features to help members deal with smaller systems, like NEXT 20 and NEXT 5 buttons.
August 14, 2001: We purchase a new dedicated server.
August 12, 2001: Several problems with our host prompt us to locate a new one.
August 11, 2001: We switch to our regular pricing.
August 10, 2001: We get encouragement from a moderator with many large lists.
August 9, 2001: We get past the 100 members mark.
August 8, 2001: Server was down 5 hours due to our host.
August 7, 2001: 10 000 messages successfully fetched by members since the beginning.
August 5, 2001: Server was down due to our host.
August 3, 2001: We introduce a feature which lists all the groups of the member instead of asking them to enter the names correctly. It saves a lot a problems.
August 2, 2001: Fixed a problem with users accessing groups from different e-mail addresses.
July 28, 2001: 03:31:36 AM: First member fetches his first page successfully.
July 27, 2001: First member registers.
July 27, 2001: We go online.
July 18, 2001: First web pages written.
July 2, 2001: First commercial scripts written.
May 15, 2001: Our founder writes his first fetch script for own personal use.
April 12, 2001: Yahoo changes inline attachements to an annoying download button.
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