500,000+ AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Icons All at Once

Details

External ID

49485262

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

500,000+ AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Icons All at Once

Website domain

buddyiconarchive.com

Launched

Aug. 28, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

8

Upvotes percentile

0.4731182795698925

Tags

—

Fetched at

Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.

Updated at

Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.

Description

I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet.I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial project site buddyiconarchive.comI think that I am perhaps 20% of the way to my goal of having a "complete" collection of all the buddy icons that ever appeared on the internet, a rough estimate based on the counts advertised by various period aggregators.I am looking to trade icons with someone who maybe has an entire backup of iconator.com or other large buddy icon sharing site. My goal would be to add them to the archive and make them widely available. These sites, it turns out, are not completely archived in Wayback Machine, or at least it would seem.If you can help, there's a contribute files/urls page - https://buddyiconarchive.com/contributeCheers! john

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