The original version of this article contained an error and has been changed. See the bottom of the article for additional information.
A website designed to help students exchange their meal plan swipes for other goods was launched and quickly shut down last week following concerns that the site violated school policies.
TradeSwipes.com is a platform where people can connect to trade meal plan swipes for notes and study guides, among other things, said Joshua La Poll, one of the creators of the website and a fourth-year history student. Students are meant to use the website to find someone they want to trade with and then meet at a dining hall to swipe for their meal.
Second-year applied mathematics studentHarsh Karthik and UCLA alumnus Zhuping Hu also helped create the website, along with Christian Blanco, a graduate student in the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
A business model based on trading swipes is against UCLA policy, university spokeswoman Alison Hewitt said in an email statement.
The site launched on Wednesday, and on Thursday, La Poll received an email from UCLA telling him that the site may be in violation of school policies. On Friday, La Poll and Blanco met with Kenn Heller, the assistant dean of students.
The newly launched website could pose a security problem, Hewitt said. UCLA Dining Services wants to prevent unaccompanied strangers from entering the dining halls, which could happen with an online swipe trade, she added.
The owner of a BruinCard is the only one who is allowed to use it to swipe for food on the Hill. Meal plan holders may not pass, loan or sell meals or their BruinCards to anyone for any reason, Hewitt said.
Blanco said that they spoke to Heller about his concerns and decided to temporarily shut down the site. The students agreed to talk further with administration to make sure all challenges have been addressed before relaunching.
La Poll said the site is only for students with a university email address. The creators of the site are already working on making the website only for students who go to UCLA, so it won’t bring in anyone who is not connected to the campus, he said.
Yoav Zimmerman, a second-year computer science student, started a similar app, Swiplur, in early December.
Zimmerman said he received an email from Heller a few days after the site was launched. He thought that the email was not important and deleted it. Within the month, his UCLA account was temporarily frozen.
Zimmerman said he has stopped
development on the site for now and is waiting for a decision from the
assistant dean of students.
A charitable program called Swipes for the Homeless had to receive prior approval before letting students donate extra swipes at the end of the quarter, Hewitt said.
“We brought up Swipes for Homeless. We said, ‘How did Swipes for Homeless get approved?’ We want to go through the appropriate channels.” Blanco said.
Karthik said he thinks the site is not a buying-and-selling market as much as it is a site to connect students.
“It’s the same thing as swiping a friend in and then them giving you their notes afterward as a ‘thank you,’” Karthik said.
Before the site launched, and now that it is down, many students hoping to trade or get swipes went through other sites such as Facebook.
Gabriella Reena, a fourth-year biology and anthropology student said that she has traded swipes in the past and is interested in a website such as TradeSwipes.
“I’ll probably use that site because I always have extra swipes, so I might as well give them away to people who are hungry,” Reena said.
Students should look into legality issues and communicate with Dining Services before making a website to make sure that they are not violating any of the school’s policies, Heller said.
La Poll said he has not had any conversations with dining staff, but researched the policies before launching the site.
Heller said there is no set punishment for violating dining policy, either by making such a site or by trading swipes, but he and Dining Services will have to evaluate the factors of each case that comes to them.
For now, the TradeSwipes website is not available for student use until there have been more talks between the founders and UCLA administration.
Correction: Zhuping Hu’s name was misspelled.
How Swipes for the Homeless differs from TradeSwipes.
1. The transaction of funds is handled entirely by UCLA Dining.
2. It took SftH months of meetings and compromise before it was approved (at a conversion rate).
3. The school is eligible for a tax write-off.
4. The donated swipes are going to HOMELESS & FOOD INSECURE UCLA STUDENTS. Hello, this is a big one.
5. Swipes learned the rules before it asked to brake them.
Thank you, Rachel. We were wondering who you contacted to obtain permission for Swipes for Homeless? Can you provide us names on who you contacted and presented your ideas to? We have talked to several admin officials including the head of the dining hall services, but everyone claims that this is beyond their jurisdiction. We agree that swipes for homeless is very different than Tradeswipes. Our logic is that we want to provide an efficient trading system for students who have excess swipes at the end of the quarter. These prepaid swipes are no longer redeemable after one quarter. Similarly, we hope we can provide a platform for students to easily obtain swipes if they run out of swipes before the quarter ends. We are here to help the students, and we want to offer the university a new service.
We are UCLA students, and we want to help our fellow students. This is probably what makes Tradeswipes exponentially harder to get approved. To clarify, we were technically not shut down, and we have not violated any policies. You can confirm this with Dean Heller. We agreed to temporarily take down the site in good faith because admin needed more time to think about it. The deans are passing us around since they think someone else should handle it. On the other hand, we at Tradeswipes believe that it’s probably about time that UCLA review their policy on the dining hall system. Similar universities such as UC Berkeley does not have policies regarding the prohibition of trading swipes. We’d be happy to learn from Swipes for Homeless since your charity work has been received well and has been quite successful.
I will follow up with you via email, thanks!