I've finally accomplished a dream that my younger self never would have thought possible, and it's all thanks to SRL. The forums aren't too active anymore, and it's honestly not as huge sn achievement for both real players and botters, but I still felt like I wanted to share.
While I was still in high school, I had gotten one account to 2k total by mostly leeching from here, but I lost the account because I got greedy and abused the God Statues construction glitch when it came out (I still think its bs that all the accounts that abused it were perma'd instead of just rolled back...). Afterward, I gave up on my dream of having a maxed account and focused on using my time to learn how to code, which I attribute a lot to these forums, to write gold farming scripts.
As my skill grew, I eventually was able to write a script that did runecrafting that was incredibly stable and able to run without fail overnight, netting me a decent profit. While other people definitely have more advanced farms than me, I was just proud to have something that I could call my own. One of the accounts eventually had over 40m RC before there was an update that made fire runes surge in price. Being greedy, I changed the script to run fire runes, but they had turned up Botwatch in the area or something and my account almost instantly got permabanned later that same day.
After that, I got reckless with my remaining accounts. A couple received macro minor bans, but I didn't care enough to change my habits at all. Eventually, one got perma'd and then the rest of my farm received straight to permanent bans. I think at this point, I'd been manually banned and my script flagged (if that's a thing). I made one more attempt at building a new account, but it was caught pretty quickly. I decided to quit RS for the time being and focus on school, where I was majoring in CS (thanks to my interest in botting).
For a while, I didn't even think about Runescape at all, but some of my IRL friends started to play Old School and we had a lot of fun messing around in F2P PVP. You know what they say, you never quit RS, you just take breaks. Eventually, when the summer rolled around, I felt the urge to start up a new account and try to hit my goal again. I set my eyes on unlocking Prif first and then focusing on max afterward. I remember how difficult it felt trying to find a way to bot harder skills as most scripts on SRL were broken by this point. I eventually received a macroing minor for using a variation of a penguin clicker script from here and I gave up on the account.
I then took another break, but it wasn't long before I started back up again. By now it was my junior year of college, and I had a lot more skill in writing scripts and had figure out a lot about how to not get banned. I got the summoning req for Plague's End out of the way first with one of the AFK holiday events and then started rebuilding slowly. I took small breaks here and there, but the account didn't really take off until this past year. Having already found a job in my senior year and only taking a few easy courses, I had time in the day to do less bottable skills. I also finally realized that I didn't mind doing some grinding myself.
A few months later... the account is maxed! I'll make another comment with the methods I took to get each skill to max below in case it helps. I'll also try to share some tips on how to not get banned on the way there. As for my account, I think I won't touch it with a script at all because it's too precious. I think I'll join a clan, learn some bosses, and enjoy the game legit until full-time work begins.
I really only have this community to thank. Everyone was really open and willing to teach, and I got to learn from some of the best SRL minds by just pouring over source code in my free time. Being here has kickstarted my career IRL and it's something I even talk about in interviews if they seem to understand what I do!
Long live SRL!