New PrincetonFML emerges

An attempted replacement of the Princeton FML website, located at the URL pfml.me, was launched on Thursday to supplant the original website, which was hacked and has been inaccessible since the beginning of reading period.

Created by Ash Egan ’14, Raymond Zhong ’14 and Jason Adleberg ’14, pfml.me is modeled nearly exactly on the old website: The coloring, the formatting and the ability to “up-vote” or “down-vote” a post mirror Princeton FML. The website calls itself “The all new Princeton FML” in its top left hand corner of the website, below the “Princeton FML” title.

At 2:10 p.m. on Thursday, the website had its first post:

“PrincetonFML is back! OLAG,” the website read.

Egan said he and the two programmers of the website, Zhong and Adleberg, decided to put together the new website because they saw it as an opportunity to make an “improved” version of Princeton FML following the first website’s technical problems.

“We want to show the Princeton students that it still exists — that Princeton FML is going to be right back up,” Egan said. “And then from there, we want to get a much bigger part of Princeton population. And we really want to see students in all the lectures with their laptops out on Princeton FML,” he added.

Egan, who is leading the website's marketing, said the team has not yet come up with specific improvements for the spin-off of the popular website.

“We just want to get something out. For today, we have a very basic format," Egan said. "And in the next couple of days, we're going to be adding different features to it and everything."

Egan said the team that is working on the new website thought of the idea as a “fun project” with “very little risk.”

A moderator of the original Princeton FML website, who was granted anonymity since moderators of the website do not identify themselves, explained that PrincetonFML.com is likely down after a series of exacerbated network errors and that the website had been hacked.

“The website that supported Princeton FML — the College FML website — went down. It has not officially been up since the middle of last year,” the moderator said. “There are servers that the Princeton FML has been using that haven’t been supported in a while.”

The moderator added that if the original website were to be replaced indefinitely by pfml.me, it would not be a problem.

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“If someone else wants to start it up, I mean, I enjoy moderating it, and I wish I could still do it," the moderator said. "But you know, if the original website is down and if someone wants to start a new one, that’s fine with me."

Staff writer Marcelo Rochabrun contributed reporting.