Changes
→History
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 important stuff 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 Toph [[Topher Cyll]] re-wrote the [[WSO Facebook]] and wrote [[WSO Blogs]] from a hole in Scotland. The site went live in July of 2003and 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 pictures]].