Facemash UPV was nice while it lasted

Well, after having a lot of fun looking at university photos on Facemash UPV, the images have been made private, meaning they removed permissions and now return the 'default' gray image :(

Is there a solution? Could facemash keep working?

  • No Yes

But would it be legal?

  • Yes honestly I'm not sure, probably not.

The quickest solution would be to do something similar to what our friend Mark did, download all the university images and host them with my own links.

Private images downloaded from UPV

There are other ways, but I don't want trouble with the university and besides I already managed to promote Grade Calculator.

The thing is that after it was published on the Facebook informer that Facemash existed, there was a flood of requests to the website, nowhere near what happened with the original Facemash but still quite a lot.

Now that it's all over, I thought it would be a good idea to share the statistical results.

I published Facemash UPV on Sunday November 8th, it received more than 1030 sessions which is not the same as 1030 users or 1030 page views, each user can generate multiple sessions, so naturally there were fewer users, specifically 981 users.

October 8th at 23:16:21

The peak day was Monday November 9th with 1876 users, when people who saw it on Sunday shared it with their classmates.

Reports, 2 and a half days

General overview up to now.

This screenshot is from right now on the 11th although the data is always from a few hours later, it's still receiving visits now.

Finally 19546 page views and 3930 users, what surprises me is the amount of time people spent looking at photos, with an average session duration of 00:04:01.

Of these 19546 page views, 2353 went to the Grade Calculator page.

Countries and cities

Left countries, right Cities.

The page has been viewed in 29 countries, most notably from the European Union, but also from Vietnam, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Probably Erasmus students or people who have been here.

Gender and age

Gender and age.

More men visited with 61% compared to women at 39%. 65% were between 18-24 years old as expected, and new users were more in the 25-54 range. Although the data isn't exact since it comes from a 23% sample of total sessions.

Device

Devices.

Not much to say about what kind of devices accessed Facemash UPV, most visits were from the university.

Mobile operating systems

Mobile Devices.

Something I'm very interested in is knowing which mobile operating systems viewed the page since Grade Calculator is currently only on Android but will soon be available for IOS.

SEO

When I made Facemash UPV I made it as messy as possible, I mean messy in that if you download the HTML source code it's awful, HTML tables with CSS inline in each tag and JavaScript code visible showing how it got the images, although PageSpeed Insights didn't give me too bad a score.

All this to see if with visits, even with a ****** page, Google would rank it among the first results.

Google search for Facemash UPV.

At first, it only showed in 1st position the post with better content without directly showing the bacota.com/facemash URL, but now if you search it appears in 2nd position since Google rewards visits and duration much more.

I thought it would never put me so high up, the important thing is that bacota.com now appears 1st and Grade Calculator is now in the top positions on Google Play.