SRL 10 Years!
Today marks the 10 year anniversary of SRL forums!!!!!!!!!! We have come a long way. Probably most of you active today have never seen a post by me, but most will have seen the rules and regulations. To those, Hi, I am WT-Fakawi, founder of SRL. To the rest: Friends from all over the world, it has been a long time! I take this Decennium opportuniy to tell my SRL story.
It was not easy getting this community together. 10 years ago the SCAR cheating community was deeply divided by several includes published by several authors. Moreover, the cheating community was about to be scattered by the legal actions taken against Kaitnieks, the owner of SCAR and the forums. Kaitnieks quickly stepped out and I took over, well, sort of. I opened a small php forum on a home computer and persuaded the includewriters (RsN, Mutant Squirrle, Squigglyo and Stupid3ooo) to work as a team or at least grant me rights over their work and blend them together into one include, to end the include war. Most of them saw no future in cheating so granted me their work, provided they'd be credited for their inventions. And some of them are to this day still credited in SRL!
I was a very active scripter at that time. I was immidiately attracted to the simple logic of colors and bitmaps, and produced dozens of -even if I have to say so myself- rather flawless scripts. (Most of them for SCARScape btw, the great frozen client written and hosted by the omnious Sythe. The client had fixed colors, fixed north compass and frozen symbols, but was yet an "ordinairy" client for rs2. It was generaly considered cheating-within-cheating, and sooo comfortable to write for). By giving those scripts away for free I managed to gather a small community, a private community mind you!, invites only by me and Wizzup. There we continued to develop the include.
Then, on Feb 13, 2006, we opened our SRL forum and presented us to the world. We where an exact lookalike of the Kaitnieks old forums, with one vital exception: no buying, no selling. We are in it for the fun and not for the "money". If you want to sell your stuff, fine, go somewhere else, no problem. Not at SRL. This proved to be the de-escalating primitive, a sort of Prime Directive, and combined with the "I don't hate, I love Runecape" Second Directive we set the friendly spirit that wanders through this community to this day. Proud of that, and you should be too!
I was obsessed with not being banned. In fact, 10 years ago, I never was. With my primitive scripting skills, I build me an army that logged in and out, one after the other, instead of the common 24/7 macro on one mule that was the de facto standard at the time. I was the first to exploit this to a 24/7 system using 8-12 players. Most script I wrote easily run 100 hours+. It was an ideal system. I run scripts for years on end. Seriously. My army grew to a staggering 50 guildminers, yewchoppers, all wearing full rune, all solved random items in their bank, and generally behaving like normal rs players would. I logged the chatlines and was able to answer to simple questions using SRL and my personal extentions. I monitored my surroundings and logged the names of those adressing me. I would respond and convince them I was no bot...
Until I was banned. On my birthday. All my bots. All of them. Years of work, gone. That REALLY spoiled my day. I deserved it, of course. It hadn't stopped me, but instead gave me the freedom to make even more obscure creations. I think HLR is a friendly tribute to that...but I have long stopped botting.
We are SRL. We are a unique bunch. We are lucky to have extremely intelligent and extremely driven people in our community. We have created something out of nothing: when all seemed lost, when runescape updates kept breaking SCAR every day, Wizzup and friends stood up and created Simba. In honour of that spirit the community started working together for Simba, and spitting out improved SRL functionality and tons of free scripts. Word spread fast that something stable and valuable had been created. Once again, we attracted a whole new generation of talented people. Our counseling system of membership proved to be the best possible filter; only with a well written script one would become a member and thus gain instant respect of the whole community. Our system still works to this day, albeit we are of course much smaller nowadays than we where back say 8-4 years ago. But whenever I see a new member, a developer, a junior or a clown, I know what I am dealing with. And this is what makes us so unique.
I will tell you what I am most proud of. And this is something that even my wife agrees on. 10 years is a long time. The majority of you came/come here as kids, most of you third world spoiled and bored, but a lot also damaged. But you all seem to find here what you are looking for. Here are the normal people. And here you found inspiration and gained knowledge. And now, 10 years later, look at you now!, so much of you are now graduate or post graduate in math, physics, science, sports, medics, computer science, economics! And many of you found strength and positivism and relativism at SRL when times where rough and some have even build lifelasting friendships here. How can you not be proud to be the flywheel that spins out positive energy so much needed for our coming generations?
So, since I knew this day would come, I downloaded simba last week and coded me a little smithing script using SRL-6, doing something with rune... and I dont know who I have to thank for all those great new facilities, but this is a really really really F great accomplishment! Yup! Gogogo SRL! 10 more years?
Love,
WT-Fakawi. Also known as the bearded yoda.
tl:dr;
yo gz 10y WT