It's clear we didn't do a good enough job explaining what we did and why. I'm overdue for jumping in here.
Despite the fact that the older "esri.com" ArcScripts was frozen to new submissions in 2010, it had been our intention to leave that site up and running as long as folks were using it, linking to it. We also agree that just because some code is 6-19 years old, doesn't make it useless. We did push a large campaign back in 2010 to ask those who own ArcScripts items to consider moving them to ArcGIS Online (thru ArcGIS.com) and due to the new terms of service, this was something that had to be actively agreed to by each items' owner. And because the user accounts between Esri Global and ArcGIS.com might be different, we had no practical way to reconcile the two to move them even if we wanted to. Some users have multiple accounts; which one do they want it moved to? In the end, we asked item owners to control their own items rather than has us muck it up against their wishes.
In the end, in reality, most of those items did not move. Perhaps the owner felt the item was no longer relevant, perhaps the owner was simply gone and didn't care anymore, perhaps a lot of things, but in the end, we kept the site up for 6 years and intended to simply leave it up.
Now while I cannot get into the details why, there was a significant event that occurred a few months back that caused us to summarily and immediately react to pull the site off-line. It is still fully available within Esri, and Tech Support analysts and any other Esri staff can still get to it, if someone contacts us needing something that was one day suddenly not there. One interesting positive by-product of pulling the site offline is that it made external search engines like Google cease crawling it, and thus stop returning decade or so old results on top of new ones. (This was a complaint we've been hearing about for years. That is, someone goes to Google looking for ArcGIS samples, and the returned results point them to stuff that's 5, 10, sometimes 15 years old and obsolete.)
The old site was invented and built in-house using really old technology. To restore the old ArcScripts site would take a significant design and development project, and we didn't have solid means to measure the cost-benefit of doing so, while at the same time pulling developers off other projects that wouldn't get done. Bringing the old ArcScripts back can be done if there is enough demand for it that helps justify making it a priority.
