My own retro page got hit by a 1998 bug I forgot existed

Last Saturday I was rebuilding my old Angelfire shrine to Xena and I slapped in a hit counter from some random CGI service. Worked fine for about 40 minutes, then the page started vomiting out weird glyphs every time I refreshed. Turns out the counter script broke because my host updated their Perl version and it couldn't handle the date format anymore. I spent 3 hours digging through a cached tutorial from 1999 that mentioned the exact fix, a simple line for the timezone offset. Eventually I hardcoded the hit count to 7,491 and called it a day, but now I'm wondering how many other dead scripts are still lurking on those old free hosts. Anyone else run into a ghost bug like that where the code outlived the platform it was built for?

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holly_craig10d ago

Read that Perl date bug actually crashed a bunch of old counters back in the day.