Freshers’ WhatsApp Groups: Watch Out!

The Fachschaft Computerlinguistik does not operate a Freshers’ WhatsApp group. We use heiCHAT instead, the chat tool hosted by the university. If you have problems joining there, please contact us.

There are also no official university-wide WhatsApp groups at Universität Heidelberg.

Unofficial WhatsApp groups

An internet search for “Ersti-Gruppe Uni Heidelberg” (“Freshers’ Group Uni Heidelberg”) with any search engine nevertheless quickly yields various WhatsApp groups as a result. These groups are not official, but run by third parties.

You can recognize the websites as unofficial by two things:

• The domain does not end with .uni-heidelberg.de.
• The imprint (“Impressum”) is not the Universität Heidelberg.

According to their own statements, at least one website with Freshers’ Groups uses them also to advertise student parties (the operators of the groups get a cut of the ticket sales), another website generally talks about “ads, sponsored content, cooperations, product placement and affiliate marketing”.

This is not a value judgement. Feel free to use (or not use) these groups at your discretion – please just be aware that we don’t have an influence on these groups and also don’t read the messages posted there.

Official heiCHAT group

Our heiCHAT chat rooms are official. Only university members can use it. If something is written in the “Heimeliger Online-Pool”, we usually notice that.

Situation for other Fachschaften

Other Fachschaften at Universität Heidelberg (for other subjects) might have WhatsApp groups. If you want to find out if such a group or the accompanying website is official, verify that the domain ends in .uni-heidelberg.de. In this case, the website is definitely official.