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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.
In January 2004, [[Tom White]] and [[Steve Winslow]] noticed the timestamp on a system file on WSO servers with a shared user base reflected a date and time that was inconsistent with that of the same file on independent WSO servers. Their further investigation showed that WSO had been compromised. They notified the rest of WSO and temporarily took systems off-line. Over the next seventy-two hours, Tom led the response team which rebuilt all WSO machines and services and tightened security. By this time, WSO was supporting thousands of users and over a hundred student organizations. Not a single piece of email was lost. [[Chris Douglas]] reported the incident to the WSO community of users on behalf of WSO; [[Tom White]] and [[Jacob Eisler]] reported the incident to College Council.
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 picture]]s.