Following the creation of a promotional Instagram account, on Jan. 28, a website called “HHS Rank” spread among students. One day later, the website was taken down by a student The Epitaph exclusively interviewed. With significant controversy surrounding the site’s function and usage, The Epitaph investigated its code. In its short run time, HHS Rank had thousands of logged interactions, prompting response from school administration.

Created on Vercel, the HHS Rank site featured a game where, based on individuals’ names and profile pictures, users could subjectively vote between two students to influence a popularity score. Based on this score, students from the Class of ‘24 through ‘27 could climb or drop in a schoolwide ranking.

Administration launches investigation:

On the morning of Jan. 29, the website was reported by a teacher and students were called into the office for a preliminary investigation, principal Denae Nurnberg said. 

“Kids were feeling uncomfortable with it and reporting that to us,” Nurnberg said. “My primary objective was to get it shut down, [and] the secondary objective was to find out who did it and address that.”

Throughout the day, Nurnberg also visited senior-only classes such as AP Government and Economics, history teacher Christy Heaton said. 

“Her biggest message was that [HHS Rank] needed to be taken down immediately and that if people knew anything about what was going on or who had done it, they needed to let administration know,” Heaton said. 

Simultaneously, administration worked to remove the site, also contacting Instagram to terminate the promotional account and notifying students, parents and staff of the development, Nurnberg said.

Student perspectives:

While HHS Rank was up, it yielded mixed reactions from students. Senior Noemi Liu said she knew many students personally upset by their rankings, so her initial reaction was conflicted and shocked.

“At one point, I was told I was pretty high up on the ranking, and I thought it would boost my ego, but I just felt disgusted that the people I knew were voting for me,” Liu said. “They made the decision to vote, but I see how it’s also something that’s out of curiosity.”

Amid the website’s promotional campaign, Liu said she and several other students received messages to their personal emails. Because she did not share her personal contact information outside of club sign-up lists, Liu said this marked another troubling aspect of HHS Rank.

While junior Aarav Almaula said he and many others found the sight humorous and not particularly harmful, it still raised concerns over permission and data access.

“From my experience, [the website] didn’t have too much of an impact on my day. From what I heard and saw because I visited once, it didn’t seem too bad,” Almaula said. “I don’t think it was that problematic, but considering the fact that they had a face and a name for everybody in the school, there were some privacy concerns.”

Site takedown:

In the afternoon of Jan. 29, the website was taken down, and its creator posted an Instagram story stating “repeatedly DDoS’d lmao. bye now.” However, the website wasn’t removed by this person or school administration externally, but rather, by an independent student. The Epitaph has interviewed this student, who will remain anonymous by the name Parker due to legal concerns.

Contrary to the creator’s assumption that the network was targeted, Parker said they found a much simpler way to take down the site while examining its source code. 

“A lot of my friends were really uncomfortable about the website having their picture and name [publicized] and being ranked among their peers, and it was a very negative thing for a lot of people,” Parker said. “When I was going through how the website worked, I found that the database wasn’t secured, so I decided to take it all down [since] I could and might as well.”

Curious about the website’s level of privacy breach, at around 2:45 p.m., Parker said they confirmed the absence of further sensitive information being collected and sent a digital request to wipe all information across the site.

“I first looked at the back end, all the information inside the database, to make sure there wasn’t any concerning information about students that shouldn’t have been there,” Parker said. “But because it only tracked students’ names, pictures and grade levels, I decided to just delete everything without saving anything.”

With basic coding knowledge and prior experience in setting up website databases for personal projects, Parker said taking down the rankings site was not a complicated process.

“When you voted on the website, you would send a little code packet directly to the database, and you would tell it to add a vote to this person’s [status],” Parker said. “But because the database wasn’t properly secured, you would be able to either get all the information from the database or send any type of packet you wanted to. [This] includes a delete packet, which would delete all the information inside the database.”

Current investigation status:

In the future, Parker said that with how easy it was to remove the website, they hope administration and the district IT team will take swift action to prevent similar incidents from breaking out.

While HHS Rank may no longer exist, administration will continue investigating its creator, Nurnberg said. With support from FUHSD chief technology officer Menko Johnson and legal consultation from local law enforcement, Nurnberg said they aim to discover how data was collected to prevent similar future incidents. 

Johnson declined to comment on the ongoing investigation of HHS Rank. 

Commenting on the site’s repercussions, Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, said HHS Rank’s creation may not have legal ramifications because, without targeting specific students, the situation does not constitute cyberbullying. 

On the other hand, administration would have needed a court order to remove the site, so Parker’s website takedown involved unlawful hacking and could thus be considered illegal, Hiestand said.

“There’s really not a vigilante exception, even though they may have been [hacking into the site] for what they considered good reasons,” Hiestand said. 

As of March 5, Nurnberg said the investigation has not yet closed and that administration has found a person of interest. 

Editor’s note: This is a developing story tied to an ongoing investigation, so further details may be added at a later date.