BuddyGopher Blog

We are taking the BuddyGopher servers down today for an indefinite period of time. Please visit our friends at Buddy4u for extended AIM profiles.

Your buddies history page now shows her *15* most recent away messages.

Theoretically, we could show you unlimited pages of away message history for each buddy. Our database currently stores over 15,000,000 away messages from 200,000 buddies on the AOL Instant Messenger network. Our servers usually collect a new away message within five seconds of a user switching to Away status.

BuddyGopher was built to scrape AIM user content using the OSCAR protocol. We have been running 5,000 simultaneous OSCAR connections for over eight months now with nearly 99.999% uptime. If you are interested in putting AIM user content on your website in a legal and timely fashion, you should e-mail us!

Pageviews might be slow and your BuddyGopher home page might not be opening in the AIM Today window. We are aware of these problems and do not have an immediate solution.

BuddyGopher serves RSS feeds of your AIM Buddy List away messages. Look for the "Enable RSS feed" button on the bottom of your home page.

We actually launched this feature a few months ago. Kudos to Marek for implementation and Zach for the pushed suggestion!

Has BuddyGopher been slow or unresponsive during the last few days? Marek vacuumed the PostgreSQL database tables several times today and re-signed on our entire array of AIM screen names. There are over 12,700,000 away messages in our database now, but home page loads should be dramatically quicker.