I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

Incident and project context

• Student built “HuskySwap” as a class project: a demo site to help students swap course seats, initially using only fake data.
• Discovered publicly documented “Student Web Service” Swagger APIs and requested a read‑only token to integrate live course data.
• Soon after the request, the registrar cited “registration tampering/abuse” policies and ordered the site taken down under threat of expulsion.

Registration policies and perceived risks

• UW policies ban buying/selling spots, holding seats, registering without intent to attend, and automated access to registration resources.
• Many commenters note that a seat‑trading platform could create perverse incentives (scalping, over‑registration, increased scarcity), even if originally free and well‑intentioned.
• Others emphasize the site never actually used the real API or touched the registration system, so at most it was an attempted or hypothetical violation.

Alleged coercion and legal framing

• Student reported that, even after removing the demo, a hold was placed preventing registration for the final quarter “unless” they agreed to help build an official solution, without pay and with university IP ownership.
• Numerous commenters describe this as extortion/blackmail, potentially implicating state extortion statutes or education‑rights issues; strong advice to consult an attorney and preserve evidence.
• A minority warns that lawyer‑to‑lawyer escalation can be slow, stressful, and costly, especially against a large institution.

Skepticism and missing pieces

• Some readers question the one‑sided narrative: lack of published email correspondence, job‑seeking tone in the LinkedIn post, team project vs. “I did it” framing, and timeline of near‑early graduation.
• Others point out the registrar’s policies were edited after the controversy to explicitly ban creating services that enable the forbidden behaviors, which reduces trust in the administration’s account.

Broader themes about universities

• Many share prior experiences of universities and agencies reacting harshly to security reports, scraping, or tooling around internal systems.
• Strong sentiment that modern university administrations are bureaucratic, risk‑averse “fiefdoms” hostile to student initiative and primarily focused on liability, revenue, and image.

Media coverage and outcome

• Local and tech media picked up the story; UW issued a general statement saying temporary holds are standard to prompt conduct meetings and that they do not “steal IP.”
• Final update from the student: the hold was removed without a disciplinary meeting; the university deemed takedown sufficient, the student pledged not to pursue HuskySwap‑like projects, and is back on track to graduate.