Dear CSU and Fort Collins Community,

Tuesday night, The Collegian planned to hold a community workshop over Google Meets called “Collegian Collabs: tips & tricks to take photos for social media.” You may have seen this event advertised on social media or on flyers around campus. Some of you may already know that the link for the event was hacked before the start of the meeting. Our workshop facilitators kicked all attendees out of the meeting, although this took some time due to the volume of attendees who joined. 

It is our understanding that before our facilitators could shut the meeting down, many outside accounts joined and shared racist, pornographic and generally inappropriate content through the chat and presenting feature. We understand that this type of content can be extremely harmful and deeply apologize for any difficulties this may have caused our fellow community members. 

Although The Collegian in no way condones or is affiliated with the content shared by the hackers, we recognize that we could have taken steps to hold the event on a more secure platform. 

The goal of this event was to give back to and be involved in our community, and we were so excited to interact with all of you in a positive and productive setting. What happened instead completely undermined this goal.

We postponed the photo workshop and are planning on holding it at 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2. As a student-run organization, this has been a learning experience, and we are confident that this incident won’t happen again. 

For this upcoming event and moving forward to future Collegian Collabs events, we will ask attendees to register ahead of time so that we can prevent any unwanted parties from entering the meeting. We will also ensure that we have heightened security in the meeting itself. 

We said we were going to be better as an organization and are still committed to that goal. We will continue to do our best so that we can keep moving forward together.

If you have any questions or comments about this incident, please contact us at letters@collegian.com. 

Respectfully,

The Collegian Editorial Board

Lauryn Bolz, editor-in-chief

Matt Tackett, digital and design managing editor

Abby Vander Graaff, content managing editor

The editorial board can be reached at editor@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.