Students 'spam' JuicyCampus

In addition to the traditional gossip, JuicyCampus' forums now include lines of free-verse poetry and portions of Wikipedia articles.

One year after the official launch of JuicyCampus.com, college students are still talking about - and criticizing - the controversial anonymous gossip Web site.

JuicyCampus mania is dying down at Penn, since the University was one of the first campuses to join the site last year.

But at George Washington University - which was one of more than 400 colleges to be added to the site this fall - students are just discovering the site's commitment to non-censored posted content.

Over the past year, college students and administrators have criticized JuicyCampus for its sometimes malicious content, which users can post anonymously without repercussions.

In an attempt to discredit JuicyCampus, GW students recently flooded the site with nonsense posts.

"We wanted the site to become a joke," Bill Flanigan, a GW student who helped lead the effort, wrote in an e-mail. He added that "if the site was full of spam, we figured that students would be less likely to visit it."

JuicyCampus founder Matt Ivester called Flanigan's system "not very effective" because the site deletes all spam posts.

"Some administrators and students have mistakenly recommended a massive spam attack," Ivester said. "It's a felony, and it's not a great idea."

While they did not defend the site, several Penn students said they agreed that posting nonsense is not the best way to combat uncensored gossip.

"The best way of resisting the site is to completely ignore it," College sophomore Chris Milione said. "If you add fuel to the controversy you end up bringing more peoples' attention to the Web site."

College freshman Natalie Parkes agreed that if students post on the site at all, it "defeats the purpose of criticizing it."

But GW is not alone in its efforts - students at other schools have also tried to clog or spam the site.

At Williams College, students posted sections from the Bible, scientific articles and poetry verses.

At Cornell University, someone used an automated program to post complete novels and sections of the Bible, which caused the site to slow down.

Most of the non-gossip related comments posted by GW students have been removed from the site.

But according to Flanigan, many of these were not spam, they were just "irrelevant or 'non-juicy.'"

It is "unfair" that the site censors non-gossip posts but not comments that students complain are personally offensive, said College freshman Shaina Mann.

Ivester said JuicyCampus policy is to delete only spam, illegal hate speech and contact information like dorm rooms or telephone numbers.

This fall, the site expanded from 63 to 500 campuses, and Ivester said it will continue to grow over the next year.

"We've got 2,400 four-year institutions in the U.S., and our plan is to be on every single one of them eventually," he said.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.