Started in 1995 by Matt Wright (at the time a high school student in Fort Collins, Colorado), the archive contains about a dozen free scripts, designed to be easily added to a site and configured.
The FormMail.pl script, in particular, was exploited by spammers to send junk email.
[4] As Perl 5 became more mature, norms in the community changed to encourage use of modules such as CGI.pm and code safety features such as strictures and taint checking; the scripts in Matt's Script Archive, however, did not follow these changes, and as a result (and also because Matt Wright wrote much of the code when he was an inexperienced programmer) tend to be buggy.
Experienced Perl programmers usually recommend against the use of these scripts, and the London Perl Mongers started an effort called "nms" to write drop-in replacements for them.
[5][6] Matt Wright himself has recommended using the nms scripts, saying:I would highly recommend downloading the nms versions if you wish to learn CGI programming.