Juicy Campus’ gossip just won’t go away.

The anonymous and controversial gossip Web site Juicy Campus, which closed Thursday due to financial problems, was quickly replaced online with a similar site.

Wesleyan University freshman Peter Frank, owner of the tell-all Web site College Anonymous Confession Board, purchased the two-month trafficking rights for Juicy Campus Wednesday night.

He took over the small Web site CollegeACB several months ago, and learned of Juicy Campus’ closing Wednesday night from CollegeACB founder and Wesleyan alumnus Aaron Larner.

Frank would not confirm the cost of the trafficking rights, but said it was five figures. He said the site was sold to him after not only financial problems from a stifled economy, but from legal actions initiated both on behalf of Juicy Campus and against it by begrudged individuals and companies.

Just days after Juicy Campus shut down and CollegeACB took its place, SU students started 18 threads and raked in one of the highest counted readerships on the site, Frank said. He added that over the course of the weekend, SU became one of the top five gossiped universities on the site.

Site traffic for CollegeACB has been up to roughly half a million views a day, from about 60,000 to 80,000 a day before the takeover, Frank said.

Annie Boardman, a sophomore marketing major at SU, checked Juicy Campus months ago to see if her name was posted. And it was. Twice.

Her good friend Alex Shimrat, an undeclared sophomore, has also been mentioned on the site. They both find gossip sites like Juicy Campus a waste, but once they found out they were mentioned, they both looked to see what was written.

‘If my name is on something, I’m going to read it,’ Shimrat said.

Boardman and Shimrat didn’t reply to the comments, calling them untrue and trashy. When Juicy Campus was shut down and all of the threads were removed, Boardman and Shimrat said they were relieved.

‘People do it because they need to feel like they’re being recognized,’ Boardman said. ‘They want to feel talked about, wanted.’

But Frank said he does not want to continue Juicy Campus’ defaming nature.

‘We’re similar in feel, but we have different goals,’ Frank said.

One feature available on CollegeACB that was not a part of Juicy Campus is the option to report a libelous comment to administrators to review for potential removal. If a student sees a post that attacks an individual or group, they can e-mail the Webmaster, Frank, who will remove the comments.

But since Frank purchased the rights to Juicy Campus’ trafficking, he has been flooded with reports of harassing messages.

‘I’ve deleted a number of posts after getting e-mails that they were libelous to members of the community,’ Frank said. ‘We’re trying to automate the process of removing posts that are offensive. We’re trying to assure that the kind of posts that Juicy Campus became known for aren’t on our site.’

Boardman has already visited the new site. She was redirected from JuicyCampus.com and said the threads on the new site read similar to the ones on Juicy Campus, but that overall appeal was lacking.

‘The layout is really plain,’ she said, noting that losing all of the previous posts from Juicy Campus might hurt the Web site’s popularity.

While Frank said he accepts that students will be mean and post harassing comments about one another, he hopes his school, Wesleyan University, can be an example of what he hopes the site will become – a resource for students to ask anonymous advice without the pressures of social situations.

‘At Wesleyan, people have started using it in a productive manner,’ Frank said. ‘My hope is that once people get over the novelty of anonymity, they’ll get something more meaningful out of the board.’

‘It’s trashy,’ said Matt Abdifar, president of SU’s InterFraternity Council. ‘Some people take it too seriously and take it too far. It serves no productive purpose and we don’t need it at Syracuse.’

Fraternities and sororities took the hits from Juicy Campus particularly hard.

‘It was a negative force within fraternities and sororities,’ Abdifar said.’ People who see things in petty ways and are superficial gravitate towards sites like that. It’s just people who have nothing better to do with their time.’

Universities have the right to track down students who make libelous comments about faculty and other students and take discipline action against them, said Lee McKnight, associate professor in the School of Information Studies.

‘Any student who thinks that they’re anonymous because CollegeACB says so, they’re wrong,’ McKnight said. ‘If there are things that get to the point that they are over the line and inappropriate, people will get tracked down.’

Action by the university is not unprecedented. In 2006, Judicial Affairs allegedly threatened to expel four freshman females after starting a Facebook group to commit libelous comments against a teacher’s assistant. One student left the university and three others were placed on disciplinary reprimand, The Daily Orange reported Feb. 8, 2006.

McKnight said students and faculty members must complain to Judicial Affairs before action can be taken.

rdjone03@syr.edu

Published on February 8, 2009 at 12:00 pm