30 years since I posted that first script back in high school! Thanks for all the love (and some hate) since then. :) Let me know if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.
In 1998 the author of the biggest German HTML/CSS/JS tutorial installed WWWBoard to create a forum. In the 2000s it must have been the biggest web development forum in German-speaking countries. Today it is smaller, but still exists.
Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.
But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.
(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)
As somebody in the ISP/webhosting business back then, I spend quite a bit of time helping people set these up. Such a blast from the past. Glad to see it is still hanging around!
Thanks for sharing everything you did. Back when I was just barely learning HTML to update my personal web sites on AOL and Geocities I found your site and that ended up putting me on a constant migration path between whatever free hosts would let me run Perl at the time just so I could have TextCounter and WWWBoard.
I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.
I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.
You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.
I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.
Although you can't see them, there are four upvotes on my comment, and it seems more reasonable to interpret them as agreement than as praise for my rather pedestrian prose or surprise at the rather quotidian ideas it expresses.
Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.
I remember originally registering in order to upvote, not to comment or submit. I'm not sure how common that is but it is a much less scary way to begin to contribute.
i remember you had a script that created animated images before that even was a thing. It exploited some kind of quirk in Netscape, must have been 1994-1996?
It cannot be stressed enough how _vital_ these scripts were to making the WWW an actual functional technical resource; These scripts were a key, if not the key, in growing the actual interactive web, showing the potential of CGI, and in guiding the evolution of web2.0 and beyond.
Its value and place in history can't be overstated.
Gosh. Seeing that is kind of more ... emotional than I'd have expected. Gonna print a screenshot of it for the memories folder. It was just such a different time. Can't imagine what later generations would think was the point of things like a web counter, but golly that was so cool back in the day. :)
"Display a text count of visitors to your web pages. Includes: zero padding, file locking, linking the count, displaying begin date and counting multiple pages."
Exactly! These old websites from the 90s that are still alive carry such a powerful dose of nostalgia. I wrote and published my first public website on GeoCities. Sadly, that's lose to time. The second one I wrote was published on 20m.com which offered 20 MB of free hosting space and a custom subdomain. That was more than 20 years ago. Incredibly 20m.com and that silly website of mine are still online: <http://encoders.20m.com/>!
If you scroll down, you'll find the obligatory visitor count on the sidebar. That's still running too! You can't see in the published HTML but that visitor counter is generated by an ISML tag.
<isml type="counter">
It's fascinating how some forgotten corners of the web are still quietly running, long after the rest of the Internet has moved on.
Much as I loved Perl when I started with it back in 2000 CGI.pm was pretty hacky with new vulns popping up every week. It's creator, Lincoln Stein was, however, one of the stable of Perl Jedi and he did a sterling job of keeping it patched with the help, if I remember, of Randall Schwartz. Them were th' days. CGI::Application was an improvement and my mainstay until the arrival of PSGI and Plack which paved the way for frameworks such as Dancer and Mojolicious.
What a throwback! I discovered these as a kid in the early days of the web. I remember the perl being a little too obtuse to grok as a preteen, but I figured out where I could change things at certain parts of the code to make things look a little differently. Those were magical years that inspired me to get into coding and problem solving as an adult. Thanks Matt.
Programmatically generating web content felt so rad in the 1990s. It's funny to me now because with deeper historical knowledge it's not a lot different than what many block-mode green screen systems were doing for a long time before that. Of course it grew up into something more, but the early web was not much different than that with fonts and image embeds and relying on the underlying transport and naming system to make it easy to span.
WWWBoard is such a nostalgia hit. My local music venue's forum was where my early internet persona originated. Sometimes I nostalgic and use Wayback machine to see what all my fellow teenagers were talking about 25 years ago.
Fun fact: WWWBoard had a brief cameo in the movie "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" -- their official community site used the script for many years after most had moved on.
Like many, I got my start with perl by finding myself having to customize a WWWBoard. The site owner then switched to a new perl based forum that used flat linear threads, the Ultimate Bulletin Board. (Which itself is based on code in Selena Sol's "Instant CGI/Perl"!) So, I learned that too. The guy that made it had a forum for it where other people were sharing their changes to the code, mind you this was a commercial product. The company ended up hiring a handful of us from that forum. I ended up doing the coding on the perl UBB for five years, launching my career.
So, thanks Matt. Your code may not have aged well, but it touched millions and millions of people.
30 years since I posted that first script back in high school! Thanks for all the love (and some hate) since then. :) Let me know if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.
In 1998 the author of the biggest German HTML/CSS/JS tutorial installed WWWBoard to create a forum. In the 2000s it must have been the biggest web development forum in German-speaking countries. Today it is smaller, but still exists.
Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.
But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.
(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)
That's interesting, thanks for sharing!
As somebody in the ISP/webhosting business back then, I spend quite a bit of time helping people set these up. Such a blast from the past. Glad to see it is still hanging around!
Thanks for sharing everything you did. Back when I was just barely learning HTML to update my personal web sites on AOL and Geocities I found your site and that ended up putting me on a constant migration path between whatever free hosts would let me run Perl at the time just so I could have TextCounter and WWWBoard.
I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.
I'm amazed that you created an HN account in 2014 but that this is your first comment. How did you resist the temptation to comment for so many years?
I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.
You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.
I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.
heh, thanks! :) To be fair, the feedback has always been more positive than negative.
Although you can't see them, there are four upvotes on my comment, and it seems more reasonable to interpret them as agreement than as praise for my rather pedestrian prose or surprise at the rather quotidian ideas it expresses.
Thank you for keeping your site up all these years.
Looking at your website brings me back to my childhood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xwY5ciOOC0&t=144s
Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.
I asked dang once and he said like 1% of visitors comment.
I had assumed that the majority of accounts are created when the owner first wants to write a comment (or post a submission).
I wonder whether dang meant 1% of registered visitors, or 1% of visitors.
I remember originally registering in order to upvote, not to comment or submit. I'm not sure how common that is but it is a much less scary way to begin to contribute.
Thank you for this site. It helped me learn Perl and use it to make some cool CGI scripts.
Wow what a small world! When I was learning Perl in the early 2000s, I learned in part by copying and tweaking your scripts.
Thanks for sharing these into the world. I found them a huge help.
Hey, thanks Matt for providing a well lit path to getting things done on the Internet before anyone knew what they were doing.
Thanks for creating this resource that helped so many people build programs for the web so long ago.
Thanks Matt!
I ran a forum (30k+ monthly users) last century using the WWWboard.
Thanks for your form mailer. That was the first cgi-bin script I had ever installed and run on Apache. xD
Wait, aren't you the guy who is currently stealing Freenode's domain name? Are you trying to bring shame to Matt?
Wait, are you a troll?
i remember you had a script that created animated images before that even was a thing. It exploited some kind of quirk in Netscape, must have been 1994-1996?
It cannot be stressed enough how _vital_ these scripts were to making the WWW an actual functional technical resource; These scripts were a key, if not the key, in growing the actual interactive web, showing the potential of CGI, and in guiding the evolution of web2.0 and beyond.
Its value and place in history can't be overstated.
Gosh. Seeing that is kind of more ... emotional than I'd have expected. Gonna print a screenshot of it for the memories folder. It was just such a different time. Can't imagine what later generations would think was the point of things like a web counter, but golly that was so cool back in the day. :)
"Display a text count of visitors to your web pages. Includes: zero padding, file locking, linking the count, displaying begin date and counting multiple pages."
Exactly! These old websites from the 90s that are still alive carry such a powerful dose of nostalgia. I wrote and published my first public website on GeoCities. Sadly, that's lose to time. The second one I wrote was published on 20m.com which offered 20 MB of free hosting space and a custom subdomain. That was more than 20 years ago. Incredibly 20m.com and that silly website of mine are still online: <http://encoders.20m.com/>!
If you scroll down, you'll find the obligatory visitor count on the sidebar. That's still running too! You can't see in the published HTML but that visitor counter is generated by an ISML tag.
It's fascinating how some forgotten corners of the web are still quietly running, long after the rest of the Internet has moved on.Related. Others?
Matt's Script Archive, Inc.: Free Perl CGI Scripts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33305258 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)
Matt's Script Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31789342 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Matt's Script Archive. Offering free CGI scripts to the web community since 1995 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391802 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
I wonder how many users still pay for formmail.com
Much as I loved Perl when I started with it back in 2000 CGI.pm was pretty hacky with new vulns popping up every week. It's creator, Lincoln Stein was, however, one of the stable of Perl Jedi and he did a sterling job of keeping it patched with the help, if I remember, of Randall Schwartz. Them were th' days. CGI::Application was an improvement and my mainstay until the arrival of PSGI and Plack which paved the way for frameworks such as Dancer and Mojolicious.
What a throwback! I discovered these as a kid in the early days of the web. I remember the perl being a little too obtuse to grok as a preteen, but I figured out where I could change things at certain parts of the code to make things look a little differently. Those were magical years that inspired me to get into coding and problem solving as an adult. Thanks Matt.
Programmatically generating web content felt so rad in the 1990s. It's funny to me now because with deeper historical knowledge it's not a lot different than what many block-mode green screen systems were doing for a long time before that. Of course it grew up into something more, but the early web was not much different than that with fonts and image embeds and relying on the underlying transport and naming system to make it easy to span.
Wow. Amazing that this page exists virtually unchanged from 30 years ago.
We've definitely lost some part of the charm of the early web when it was common to get email, web space, FTP, and even shell access from your ISP.
https://sdf.org if you want some of that back
Oh wow. That brings back memories. I think every site I built back then at least used that FormMail script.
Then we started transitioning to Lisp, and somehow ended up with PHP.
In any case, I don't think I'd be here without your help, Matt. Big, big thanks!
Another legendary throwback from that era:
https://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
WWWBoard is such a nostalgia hit. My local music venue's forum was where my early internet persona originated. Sometimes I nostalgic and use Wayback machine to see what all my fellow teenagers were talking about 25 years ago.
Fun fact: WWWBoard had a brief cameo in the movie "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" -- their official community site used the script for many years after most had moved on.
Here is the scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2NHTRgH3G0
(Caution very NSFW language)
You can still find some of these boards online. It's like seeing a thylacene crossing the street.
wow, thanks Matt. You and Lincoln Stein (Bioperl founder if I remember correctly) got me started with my first website.
Like many, I got my start with perl by finding myself having to customize a WWWBoard. The site owner then switched to a new perl based forum that used flat linear threads, the Ultimate Bulletin Board. (Which itself is based on code in Selena Sol's "Instant CGI/Perl"!) So, I learned that too. The guy that made it had a forum for it where other people were sharing their changes to the code, mind you this was a commercial product. The company ended up hiring a handful of us from that forum. I ended up doing the coding on the perl UBB for five years, launching my career.
So, thanks Matt. Your code may not have aged well, but it touched millions and millions of people.
OMG. Just the name brings back memories.
I spent so much time hacking on scripts from here in the those early internet days... ahh memories.
CGI bin babbbyyyyyy
oh wow. This is one of those things that I remember, but I never would have thought of it specifically. Formmail.pl !
Ahhh, WWWBoard. Those were the days!
Last updated in (2009), it seems.