Daily Skiff

With the recent closing of anonymous college gossip Web site JuicyCampus.com, a new forum for anonymous posting has taken root.

CollegeACB.com, or the College Anonymous Confession Board, is now supporting all campuses previously supported by JuicyCampus, said Peter Frank, owner of CollegeACB and freshman student at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

Frank said he talked to Matt Ivester, founder of JuicyCampus, and they worked out an agreement that would direct traffic from JuicyCampus to CollegeACB. Currently, JuicyCampus' Web address automatically redirects to CollegeACB.

"Matt told me I could copy and paste the list (of schools)," Frank said.

Frank said he initially got in touch with JuicyCampus on Wednesday inquiring about purchasing ad space and requested to buy JuicyCampus' traffic after he found out the Web site was closing.

Frank said the conversations with Ivester were purely about transferring traffic from one site to the other. The two made a five-figure deal in which all traffic to JuicyCampus will be rerouted to CollegeACB for two months, Frank said.

"I didn't advise him, and he didn't advise me," Frank said.

Ivester declined an interview with the Skiff in an e-mail through his public relations agent.

While he said that CollegeACB is like JuicyCampus in that it is a forum for students to discuss topics considered taboo, Frank said it works differently from JuicyCampus because it runs a user-reporting feature in which visitors to the Web site can report content as offensive. After that, Frank said, the reports go into a computer algorithm that determines how many reports it will take to consider a post offensive. If the post meets the criteria set by the algorithm, the post will be removed by the algorithm itself. Frank said the algorithm is in the process of being applied to all campuses supported by CollegeACB.

Former Student Body President Thomas Pressly, who co-authored a resolution condemning JuicyCampus in February 2008, said he wasn't surprised by the existence of CollegeACB.

Pressly said that despite the user-reporting feature, the gossip it could spread is still damaging.

"I still think gossip is gossip," Pressly said. "Even if they remove it, 10 people could have already read it."

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