On August 29th, 2001, the Trade Assistant was completely rewritten. Here is a full list of the changes:

• We no longer support the checkboxes which allowed you to indicate that you were willing to trade any pin you owned, or that you wanted any pin you don't already own. Very few members were using these features effectively, and to those we apologize, but most other members were either not using these features, confused by them, or running into problems because of them. We're hoping that those members who wish to continue to trade this way will please contact us about what we could provide going forward.
   
  
• When viewing pin information pages, you will now see statistics about how many members want the pin and are trading the pin. You can click on the statistic headers to see the lists of users who want or are trading the pin. Note: members who have indicated that they wish to be anonymous will not show up on these lists. Also, members whose e-mail addresses are not marked public will show up with an e-mail address of "N/A".
  
  
• When viewing pin information pages, you can now click links to add the pin to your collection, your want list, or your traders.
  
  
• The page which displayed a member's trade and want lists has now been broken apart into a trade list and a want list. This allows proper pagination as well as multiple views (ie. thumbnails). If you have existing links to your trades and wants list, then anyone following those old links will be presented with the option to view your trades or view your wants.
  
  
• The new automated Trade Assistant works in two ways. The first way is to view a pin information page and then click a link which finds anything from your traders that you could potentially trade for that one pin. The second way is to run the "find trades now" like before, except that it will now only display a list of pins that you could potentially trade, and you will need to click on each one to see what you could get for it. No longer will the Trade Assistant work on every possible trade at the same time, as this was too long, too crazy, and not what people wanted. It also caused many browser problems.
  
  
• You will also be able to operate the automated Trade Assistant in reverse, where you start with a list of the pins you could trade for, and then can click each one to see what you could trade to get them.
  
  
• The new automated Trade Assistant now stores up all potential trade requests from any given member and sends out a single e-mail early in the morning. No longer will anyone receive multiple messages from the same person on the same day. This has the added advantage that you can edit any of your trade requests if you do so before that e-mail goes out.
  
  
• When the new automated Trade Assistant sends your requests out in the morning, you will also receive a confirmation e-mail detailing which members received your requests.