Content & Docs
Buddy Icon Archive
Last updated 2026-08-29 · benchmark measured 2026-08-29 — deterministic & reproducible
A searchable archive of over 514,000 classic AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons.
Is Buddy Icon Archive production-ready?
Legit.Show scores Buddy Icon Archive 81 out of 100 — the simple average of its 7 measured frames. Legit.Show ran its deterministic 7-Frame production-readiness benchmark on Buddy Icon Archive (public-surface assessment), measured from the public surface with no LLM in the scoring path. Its strongest frame is Accessibility; its weakest is Privacy. Every frame it averages is published with its evidence on the Legit.Show listing.
The 7 Frames
- Performance — 78/100
- Accessibility — 100/100
- Security — 100/100
- Privacy — 0/100
- Reliability — 100/100
- Standards — 89/100
- Discoverability — 100/100
What we measured
- Security headers present: CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy.
- Served over HTTPS with a valid certificate.
- Real Lighthouse performance run — 257 ms to first byte.
- Returns a proper 404 for unknown routes.
- 3 of 3 sampled routes reachable.
- No privacy policy found.
- Sets cookies / loads scripts with no consent prompt.
- Discoverable: structured data, sitemap, OpenGraph image, canonical URL.
Who it's for
Internet historians · AIM nostalgia enthusiasts · Researchers · Digital preservationists · Retro culture fans
Visit Buddy Icon Archive → · Alternatives to Buddy Icon Archive → · How this was measured →