The Excel Power Users built a company-wide announcement tool

“It's more of a proof of concept.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Officially because the approval chain includes 3 people and one shared mailbox. Started as Stock_list_final_use-this-one.xlsm with a script attached.

Built by:

Nadia, an intern

Build time:

9 evenings

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

Redis with persistence disabled because "it is only a cache"

Authentication:

the admin page is hidden by removing the link

Deployment:

behind a domain that still contains the word demo

Responsible:

a shared mailbox nobody reads

Documentation:

an architecture diagram containing a box labelled "magic happens here"

Security situation:

rate limiting consists of hoping nobody notices

Future disaster:

It will create a GDPR incident somebody describes as "probably minor".

Age: 166 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 117 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: €860k per year, 258 users, nobody owns it.