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.com

I 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/contribute

Cheers! john