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==History==
WSO was founded in January of 1995 by [[DeWitt Clinton]] and [[John Kim]], with help from [[Jon Zeppieri]], [[Jason Gladstone]], [[Jessica Mintz]], and others. Originally, the first server was an Apple Powermac 7100 running WebStar, on loan from the [[College Council]]. The original mandate from the CC was to create an online version of the daily advisor. John and DeWitt successfully ignored this mandate for serveral years.
1996 saw the beginning of the Internet boom, and the arrival of many new recruits to WSO. With the strong UNIX [[Unix]] background of [[Jon Zeppieri]], [[Iein Valdez]], [[Geoff Hutchison]], and [[DeWitt Clinton]] and a blazingly-fast Pentium I 100MHz machine, WSO was migrated to a FreeBSD-based server. Meanwhile, WSO attracted the artistic talents of [[Kate Tan]], [[Eric Smith]], and [[Kenric Taylor]]. Others lending their computer expertise and love for technology included [[Matt Garland]], [[Ken Fowler]], and [[Christine Soarse]]. Finally, [[Jonah Wittkamper]] served as general all-around cheerleader for WSO.
The fall of 1996 saw the arrival of a new crop of freshman, including [[Chuck Hagenbuch]] (would would go on to design [[IMP|Horde/IMP]], the Williams College Webmail system), [[Dan Mason]] ([[HTML ]] coder extrordinaire), [[Chris Richards]] (security and [[FSH ]] enthusiast), [[David Ramos]] (designer and typographer), and [[Jason Healy]] (future all-campus listserver nazi). By winter, the website had been overhauled (sporting a scan of Chuck's right hand), and new services were cropping up like crazy: the online [[Facebook]], all-campus and dorm listservers[[listserver]]s, online DA [[Daily Advisor]] and calendar announcements, and a small software archive.
WSO continued to grow at a rapid pace, as new services were added and members signed on for web and e-mail accounts. [[Free University]] HTML courses were taught to students and members of the community by [[David Ramos]], [[Ben Isecke]], and [[Jacob Eisler]], and several clubs and organizations at the college created web pages about themselves.
In the fall of 2002, abuse of the [[WSO Forums]] continued. A thread entitled "Gays Suck" prompted the [[Queer Student Union]] to print out the thread and post it in [[Baxter Hall]], inviting responses with paper and pen. Abuse escalated at the end of October, at which time there were several pornographic images, violent threats, and racist, sexist, and homophobic posts to be found in the forums. On October 30, the forums were removed.
But they were to return. [[Shimon Rura]] led a site re-write in the spring and summer of 2003. One goal of the re-write was to authenticate users, so that their postings and doings could be identified. The site was written with [http://www.pagekit.org Apache PageKit]. Shimon wrote the authentication system and the [[WSO Ride Board]], [[Josh Ain]] wrote a new menu feed, [[Tom White]] re-wrote the [[WSO Forums]], [[Evan Miller]] re-wrote some screen scrapers, and [[Topher Cyll]] re-wrote the [[WSO Facebook]] and wrote [[WSO Blogs]] from a hole in Scotland. The site went live in July of 2003 and has grown in features and popularity since then.
Toph, Tom, Brent, Jacob, and Steve graduated in the spring of 2004, and around that time [[Ben Cohen]] and [[Dan Weintraub]] were given [[root]]. During the summer, Evan and Dan converted [[WSO Plans]] from its standalone PHP/MySQL incarnation over to PageKit, so that students could access it from off-campus without [[setting up a proxy server]]. Also, they converted the Postgres database and the website over to UTF-8/Unicode. With the help of [[Masha Lifshin]] and [[Sam Dreeben]], the duo made much-envied but never-imitated Quicktime VRs for their [[Facebook picturespicture]]s.
In the fall of 2004, [[Kai Steverson]] rewrote [[Factrak]] for [[on hire by College Council]] , to enhance the ability abilities of the admin, make comments expire, and allow raters to "agree" with comments left about professors. Kai also wrote [[My Survey]] that semester. Evan re-wrote the [[WSO Facebook]] (again) to include faculty and more information fields. The new Factrak's interface pulled entries and faces from the new Facebook.
In February 2005, WSO was hacked by a group of Brazilians calling themselves Simiens Crew 2005.
