Student

Party agenda WageningenUP ceases following hack

After ten years, WageningenUP throws in the towel. The site was recently hacked, and rebuilding the Wageningen party site was just too much work. ‘It has been nice, but it’s time’, says founder Tim Möhlmann.
Stijn van Gils

© Sven Menschel

The PhD candidate in the Entomology group had considered stopping for some time. ‘I am moving much less among students’, Möhlmann explains, who wants to focus the next few months on his PhD thesis. ‘It is difficult to find people willing to take over and do the work, and even that is time consuming. So as far as I’m concerned, this hack is a good time to stop.’

This heralds the end of the website and of the party agenda of WageningenUP that was published biweekly in Resource. For the time being, Resource will be managing this agenda internally. WageningenUP’s Facebook page, counting nearly 4,500 likes, will remain active for now. ‘That is not as much work. All we basically need to do is occasionally remove fake accounts. So you can certainly keep posting parties there; the only thing is that there won’t be a nice overview made of it afterwards.’

Hyves

WageningenUP, where UP stands for Uitgaans Promotie (‘party promotion’), saw the day of light nearly ten years ago. Möhlmann, still a student at the time, noticed that there was a need for a structured overview of all parties around town. He started a page on Hyves, the Dutch social media platform that was very popular at the time. Facebook quickly took over, and so WageningenUP transferred along with the students. ‘As a clear agenda function was still lacking on Facebook, a website was started. Together with my brother and my flatmate – Viola Visser, who is now my girlfriend, by the way – we created a website.’

The website was built in Drupal (a content management system), with several proprietary changes on top. However, those changes made by the team would stop working once the base Drupal system would be updated, so they skipped the updates. ‘I suspect we were found by an automated bot that took over the website. We could salvage it, but it would be as much work as starting over. We will not be doing that.’

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