MSA is probably the most popular repository of web scripts currently available on the internet.
Why do we need a replacement for Matt's Script Archive?
The problem is that the scripts in Matt's Script Archive aren't very good. The scripts are well known amongst the Perl community to be badly written, buggy, and insecure. Anyone asking for support on Matt's scripts in any forum will be told in no uncertain terms that they shouldn't use his scripts.
Unfortunately for some time there were no replacements for Matt's scripts that you would want people to use. In 2001, the London Perl Mongers decided to address this problem and write a series of drop-in replacements for Matt's scripts. This project is the result.
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In May 2002, Matt Wright gave the MSA web site a major redesign. He included a page about nms. Here are a couple of extracts.
While the free code found at my web site has not evolved much in recent years, the general programming practices and standards of CGI programs have. nms is an attempt by very active programmers in the Perl community to bring the quality of code for these types of programs up to date and eliminate some of the bad programming practices and bugs found in the existing Matt's Script Archive code.
I would highly recommend downloading the nms versions if you wish to learn CGI programming. The code you find at Matt's Script Archive is not representative of how even I would code these days.