The seeded accounts, and the fake reviews on the sign-in page

This is not a comfortable entry to write, and it is the one most worth publishing.

On 13 December 2025, 202 contributor accounts were created in a little over three hours to make the platform look busier than it was. They never opened a session, never uploaded a note, never wrote a post or a comment. What they did have was nine platform reviews written on their behalf — all nine marked published, and therefore being served to every person who reached the sign-in and registration pages. Meanwhile six reviews written by actual students sat unapproved and invisible.

All 202 accounts, the nine fabricated reviews, and the achievement rows generated for them have been deleted. Every document removed was written to a backup file first, because a deletion of that size should be reversible by a person with a text editor rather than only by whoever still holds a database snapshot.

The public member count dropped accordingly. The number you see now is smaller and it is real, which is the entire point: a student who installs an app because of a figure that turns out to be fiction does not come back, and every fabricated number on this platform has now been removed — the invented homepage statistics, the two hardcoded leaderboard ranks, and these.

Test rows left in production were removed in the same pass.