Pagford Parish Council website

The Pagford Parish Council website was an Internet website for members of the Pagford parish council. There, they could commiserate with other members of the council and post the latest news of the parish. The site's URL was http://pagfordparishcouncil.co.uk.

The site's overall appearance and design were considered horribly outdated by anyone familiar with the modern Internet. It included a basic message board feature which generally saw little traffic and wasn't regularly moderated, with old posts being kept at least three years.

In theory, accounts on the website were available only to those who were members of the council. In practice, however, the site had weak security measures that anyone with a basic knowledge of SQL hacking procedures could bypass. This was first successfully managed by Andrew "Arf" Price after learning the basics of the process in school, and by doing this he managed to change the username of the account of the deceased Barry Fairbrother to Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, then used the account to post scandalous but nevertheless true accusations against his father. The method was later used by Sukhvinder Jawanda and Stuart Wall, respectively to post allegations against Parminder Jawanda and Colin "Cubby" Wall.

Despite the hacking, the manager of the website was in a state of denial and refused to take comprehensive measures to prevent future attacks on the site, feeling a sort of strange anticipation at what would be posted next.

Behind the scenes

 * In real-life, the URL http://pagfordparishcouncil.co.uk was registered as a redirect to a personal blog by someone located in the United Kingdom, having apparently not been claimed by either J.K. Rowling or the publishers of ''The Casual Vacancy.