Spring Fling 2009: CLIPSE

The first confirmed act for Spring Fling this year is CLIPSE.

Confirmed by Myspace, which has them performing at Wesleyan University on the 6th of May this year, two weeks after they're at Coachella.

So we've got a big rap act down. Based on previous years I would still expect another headlining act with indie cred, and a smaller opening act with indie cred... which doesn't usefully narrow the field of existing artists.

Grainy two-year-old footage of the Clipse:


Although, anonymous respondent #21 on this ACB thread claimed earlier today that the full lineup will have King Khan and the Shrines joining Clipse and SONIC YOUTH (!!!), which would fit the established pattern and be fantastic. But Clipse is the only one of those confirmed so far, so as of now this excellent lineup is an only partially substantiated rumor.

Sonic Youth's official site has the band booked through May, although there is a conspicuous gap between their shows in Luxembourg on April 26th and Brooklyn on May 16th. It's possible that they could make it to Middletown halfway between those dates.

King Khan and company also have a May 6th gap on their itinerary - they're in New York on the 3rd of that month, and in Boston on the 7th, so a stop at Wesleyan the day before the latter date is feasible.

But this is unsubstantiated! In the meantime, keep speculating. Post rumors/further substantiation as you wish.

The ACB is broken

So, apparently trolls have taken over the Wes CollegeAcb, causing the admin to take some desperate measures.

More on this incredibly important story, as it develops.

ACB gets influx of new users with the closing of JuicyCampus

You might notice that if you go to the now-defunct juicycampus.com, it redirects you to CollegeACB. CollegeACB was created earlier this year (I guess, technically, last year, but this school year) by Aaron Larner '08 and Andrew Mann from JHU, but is now owned and operated by Peter Frank '12. Most of the Wesleyan ACB activity switched over from its old home on LiveJournal to the CollegeACB site soon after it was created.

Despite these efforts to draw in the old JuicyCampus crowd to the site, CollegeACB distinguishes itself quite clearly from JuicyCampus in its recent press release:

The site is devoted to promoting actual discussion, not provoking salacious posts or personal attacks. Its mission statement reads: “The College ACB or College Anonymous Confession Board seeks to give students a place to vent, rant, and talk to college peers in an environment free from social constraints and about subjects that might otherwise be taboo."

Such a philosophy sets the ACB apart from Juicy Campus, a website that fostered superficial interactions, often derogatory and needlessly crude. By contrast, the ACB consistently hosts a higher level of discourse—while still making room for the occasional gossip post.

Other differences between the ACB and the now-defunct Juicy prove more than superficial. The ACB employs an innovative user-moderation button, which allows for easy yet unobtrusive regulation. Any post that might be threatening, libelous, or otherwise illegal, is immediately brought to the webmaster’s attention.

Read the full press release here.

Problems with Juicycampus & other "online rumor websites"

Holly Wood '08 sends in an article that prominently features JuicyCampus.com... you know, the gossip website that made an attempt a while ago to take away posters from the Wesleyan ACB and failed miserably.
The header of JuicyCampus says "C'mon. Give us the juice. Posts are totally, 100% anonymous." In contrast, the CollegeACB header says "Speak your mind. The anonymous confession board gives students a place to vent, rant, and talk to their peers about things that might otherwise be considered taboo."
The Reader's Digest article recounts:

When Vanderbilt University freshman Chelsea Gorman was raped near campus in the spring of 2007, her life was shattered. She told only her close friends about the ordeal and left school for the rest of the semester after she began suffering panic attacks, but by last March she was back in Nashville and putting her life together. Then she got a phone call from a friend. The story of her rape had been posted on the Internet.

"Chelsea Gorman Deserved It" was the title of a message posted on juicycampus.com, a popular website dedicated to anonymous gossip about college students. "Everyone thinks she's so sweet, but she got what she deserved," wrote the unnamed author of the post, who went on to express envy for her rapist. Suddenly the whole campus knew about the devastating attack, and Gorman's fellow students talked about it in front of her.

...

"The business model of these sites is hate," says Parry Aftab, a lawyer who specializes in Internet privacy and security issues. "They're promoting it. They're encouraging you to say outrageous things."

Smear someone in a traditional media outlet, like a newspaper or a talk show, and you can end up in court. But the law that Congress passed in 1996 establishing basic Internet regulations prevents website hosts from being held responsible for what outsiders post on their sites. In other words, the law says that the kind of defamation that would get the New York Times sued is fair game on JuicyCampus.

I'm not sure that this is so far off from something that could happen on our own CollegeACB. The article goes on to discuss other websites that encourage invasive gossip, ways to deal with online harassment, and the possibility for legal action.

Maybe next time you write on CollegeACB, think before you post?

[EDIT] Check out our previous coverage of JuicyCampus:

• And you thought the ACB was bad...
• JuciyCampus.com controversy
• Beware the ACB

[ /EDIT by Justin, 4:37 PM]

More Ways to Be Anonymous

Apparently the ACB is popular. This is understandable: we long for the days when the internet was a place to be anonymous - now, of course, the very nature of online social networking requires our participation, lest we allow ourselves to be defined by others.

Wesleyan students now have two new options for anonymity online:

Aaron Larner '08 has started a new ACB for all colleges, called CollegeACB.com (the Wes page is here). He says there are a couple of advantages to the normal ACB, one of which is that all the posts are searchable. Personally I think that takes some of the fun out of it, but for those searching to see if they've a secret, anonymous admirer, it may be just the ticket. It can also be accessed from http://wesfessup.com. He also says he is willing to let the users decide whether or not he should place ads on the site, the money from which would then be donated to a good cause.

The ACB chat is back as well, in the form of http://weschat.blogspot.com. Some people liked this, I imagine, but I don't think it has quite the power of the ACB, simply because it will inherently have less users (since they have to be there in real time).

So for everyone who is feeling a little claustrophobic - get out and be anonymous! But read the NYT article I linked at the top: it's an interesting study of why we value anonymity so much.

Beware the ACB

Quick note: The JuicyCampus "scandal" that has been causing such a frenzy in news media lately may no longer fall so far from home. A major CT newspaper has contacted the founder of the original ACB for an interview. We knew this moment was coming...

JuicyCampus.com Controversy

So JuicyCampus.com - the younger but more global version of the ACB - is getting a lot of attention in the media. It was created by "Mr. Ivester" of Sigma Phi Epsilon, and according to a NYT article, a student from Yale has had a porn film exposed and there's been the general outing of who's a slut, a bitch, etc. But according to the site's terms, you can't write anything
“unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortious, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy.”
Now colleges like Columbia and Yale are trying to ban it and the feds are getting involved. Ivester has the communications decency act to help him out, and at the same time, there's a site called reputationdefender.com where people can remove anything they don't like being said about them on the internet. So would it be juicy if it were white-washed? And where would the ACB stand in all of this?

EDIT: Check out our prior coverage of JuicyCampus. (Justin)

And you thought the ACB was bad...

Have you heard about Juicy Campus?

I hadn't, until I came across a column in Newsweek's Education section called "Modern-Day McCarthyism". In the column, Evan Thomas, a journalism professor at Princeton, compares Juicy Campus to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's smear tactics in the 1950s:

The bullies and gossips have found a way of exploiting a new medium—the Internet—to have their fun. Unlike McCarthy, who craved publicity, the modern-day campus blowhards thrive on anonymity. But they are alike in knowing how to use the medium of the moment to attract large audiences to smear individuals, who have no effective recourse.

What's Juicy Campus, you ask? Mr. Thomas can explain:

Juicycampus.com, the Web site for campus gossip that urges students to "just give us the juice," has been popular since it arrived at Princeton earlier this winter. Postings entitled "Most overrated Princeton student" and "Sluttiest Girl," along with another discussing who was rejected by Princeton's eating clubs, were viewed more than 10,000 times, according to the school paper, the Daily Princetonian.

From what I've seen of it, Juicy Campus is the ACB on steroids.

Check out Juicy Campus and you'll see what I mean. Select your campus and anonymous cruelty is readily available and easily categorized. Want to read some dirt on your English professor? Click on the Faculty/Administration tab. Smear your enemies on the Students tab, or let loose on the frat that failed to give you a bid on the Greek Organizations tab.

With a single click (on the Virginia Tech page, for example), you can read about how "Kelley F******* is a self-centered whore ". Not enough? Maybe you didn't know that "DZ girls are SLUTS":

bottom line is, if you want pussy: go knock at their door. they're always 'open' and i assure you they don't mind. their argument is: "sure, we're sluts but at least we're popular"

After you cut through the talk of pregnancies, penis sizes, and the various venereal diseases of different girls on campus, don't forget to check out the number of epithets hurled at unpopular professors.

You can even help build community on the site by rating each post's juiciness!

I guess my biggest problem with this sort of anonymous online gossip is, well... is this not the kind of stuff that encourages people to shoot up their high schools? Or colleges? And what, if any, positive contribution to society can come of this sort of anonymous malice? What light (or rather, darkness) does this shed on the ACB? And on anonymous comments on blogs such as this one?

Introducing the ACB Vanity Search

wesfessup.com 

from here:

"Yes, you heard it right. No more going through pages after pages in the countless past archives of acb searching for your own name on the vaunted crushlist, or holding your breath while waiting for a whole entire mysterious comment thread about the list of the most desperate people on campus to load and hoping that it's not you. No, why go through all of the hassle, worry and suspense when you can find your own dirt and your significant other's dirt, with one simple and fast centralized search. 

And for ye of little faith out there, I have a message for you. Don't be little doubting thomases, take that leap of faith and search for your name, the chances are, there's someone out there thinking of you. 

This one's for you, wes_acb."

Thanks to Paul Cao '08!

(use at your own discretion.)

The ACB

The ACB XIV seems to have died, so I can't announce this there, as I normally do. I'm not sure why it died, or how, but it seems to be inaccessable (although people can still make comments on it, apparently, because the last one was at 4:15 this afternoon).

Anyways, I present to you, the greater Wesleyan community, the ACB XIV.V

The first rule of project mayhem is....

One anonymous commenter asked what the deal with the firebombing talk on the ACB is about. Surprisingly, this was not about chocolate sauce in various orifices, but rather, an incident that occurred 17 years ago in 1990.

An Argus Article from 2004 described the incident:

On April 7, 1990 at 4 a.m. a fist-sized rock was thrown through the Wesleyan President's window followed by two Molotov Cocktails. Shots were allegedly fired from an AK-47 in the bushes of Van Vleck Observatory towards South College.

Full article here

The short nytimes article about the guilty plea of the perpetrator (Link) had this excerpt:

Prosecutors said Mr. Ranganathan and Mr. Haddad had planned the firebombing to retaliate for what they saw as the university's failure to promote the rights of minorities.

From what I can gather, the firebombing was, at least in part, student protest calling for the divestiture of apartheid South Africa. The debate on the ACB shows that there is some disagreement about whether this was actually a legitimate act and whether it was handled fairly.

I just have to say: wow, I never heard about this event my entire freshman year. I mean, between stories about how a certain literary society paid the Grateful Dead to play on Foss Hill in LSD and the fact that Joss Whedeon had sex in the cinema you think someone would've mentioned a firebombing that wasn't just some kid being dumb Clark. Normally, I think throwing moltov cocktails at anything is a bad way to encourage your point in a debate, but i may just not understand power dynamics.

Perhaps my older and wiser fellow wesleying contributors wish to comment?

Professor Shapiro must be pretty cool

Lauren Barth '09 is writing maybe the best research paper ever about the ACB. She needs to interview a freshman, a junior, and a senior, but "The perspectives of people of any class year who post un-anonymously or who have been mentioned frequently would also be especially welcome". In true ACB spirit, your comments will remain--you guessed it--anonymous, and you can add or retract statements before the paper is turned in.

Interested? E-mail lbarth@wes.

The ACB is famous

Peter Hull '10 sends us this excellent link.

"Hir (hirs): Gender neutral for him and her. At Wesleyan University, incoming freshmen are instructed to use gender-neutral pronouns in campus correspondence. As one person wrote on the university’s online Anonymous Confession Board, “I am usually attracted only to people of hir original gender, rather than hir intended gender. As such, I’m afraid that I’m, like, viewing hir wrong, or not respecting hir wishes or something.”"

Anonymous Email at Princeton

Princeton's student government introduced anonymous email so students can communicate their, um, ideas to their professors.

"You can write stuff like 'I think you use PowerPoint too much' or 'I think your lectures would be more interesting if you asked for questions at the end,' " USG president Rob Biederman '08 said. "We trust and hope that people will not abuse the system."

While the system seems to screen for abuses, one could imagine the potential if such a thing were instituted at Wesleyan. Oh the things we could find to bitch about...

(via The Paper Trail)

ACB/WesConfess: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

After some discussion went down regarding WesConfess' awesomeness and privacy issues, Wesleyinger Holly suggested I write a post explaining my thoughts. Here it is, the longest Wesleying post... ever.

WesConfess is a student-run online confession board modeled after the LiveJournal-based Anonymous Confession Board (currently in its eighth incarnation, and was based on the Oberlin Anonymous Confession Time LJ post). Wesleying has covered WesConfess twice before, a full announcement when it first made its debut, and a quick reminder of its existence just today.

Looking for anonymous advice on your secret crush? WesConfess may just be the place for you. Want to see if someone's got the hots for you? Check it out. Is your gonorrhea acting up again? You may be better off confiding in your significant other.

The Good
WesConfess is different from (better than) the ACB in the way it organizes your posts. Instead of a 28 page long confession board that needs to be replaced every time it hits LiveJournal's 5000 post limit, it's a sortable compendium of every juicy nugget that's been posted. One can sort by thread name, author, # of replies, # of views, star-based rating, or time of last post. Not enough for you, Mr/s. Web 2.0?

You can even get an RSS feed of the posts. SICK.
The Bad/Ugly/etc...
WesConfess is hosted, from what I can gather, by a student. The ACB, conversely, is hosted on LiveJournal, owned by blogging software company SixApart. The only drawback to WesConfess is privacy, or depending on how you look at it, trust.

The first two versions of the ACB weren't completely anonymous. Users began to notice this:
Oops.
A user on the first ACB said it doesn't matter, because:

...there are only a few ip addresses for the entire campus. all you'd really be able to surmise from those ips is that it came from wesleyan

I'm not sure what the Wesleyan network was like in 2005, but if it's the same as today, you can tell what user belongs to a certain IP, even from remote locations. Case in picture:
bjordan.stu? What student could that be?
From a server in Texas, my first initial and last name. The point is, any normal post on the ACB or WesConfess sends your IP along, including your name.

So can you post about your first time doing [VERB] with a [NOUN] with confidence on the ACB? What about on WesConfess?

ACB: The newest version, the ACB VIII, has the IP address logging option turned off. You can post with safety, as long as you trust your connection and SixApart.

WesConfess: I'd worry more if the site's semi-anonymous administrator had their options set up like this:
Ooh! I know! Click the one on top!
WesConfess' FAQ states the user's anonymity is based on trust, and:

When IP logging is turned off, it not only does not display the IP addresses of posts, it does not save them. So there would be no way to get the IP of a post after it was made.

This isn't entirely true. I set up my own test MyBB-based board (the same type as WesConfess), and someone made an especially embarrassing post:

There are two ways to get IPs as the admin. The first, which the "log posting" option disables, looks like this:

The second is more standard, and applies to most any webserver (specifically, those using Apache). Most webserver software logs every request made, by default. In my test implementation, I grabbed the server log and performed a search for posts made at the same time as that embarrassing revelation:
AH! YOU KNOW MY WEBBROWSER!
Resolve the host and you know who that IP belongs to. The point is, your anonymous posts aren't so anonymous, and you need to trust the owner of the site.

Honestly, who fucking cares?
In all reality, the WesConfess admin probably isn't trying to sell your secrets on Wes Classifieds. Beyond that, they probably hadn't planned on using server logs to pwn IPs. Really, I am just telling them exactly how to abuse trust if they wanted to. And throwing my IP out there a few times.

And as was discussed in our comments, you can also have your privacy violated by someone with a wireless sniffer, radio scanner, a very good ear or even well-placed eyes!

But there are answers!

Proxy servers and Tor provide pretty solid anonymity when web browsing, so put one of these in place and news of your personal life will only be known to strangers who may or may not know you. As for the other stuff, plugging in your ethernet, digital cellphones, loud noises and flashbangs will keep you (relatively) safe.

WesConfess, keep on truckin'. The board is very entertaining. And Holly, who suggested I write this, you owe me an entire Thursday afternoon.

Guppy Theory of Attraction

Why do some guys at Wesleyan seem to get an unbelievable amount of crushin' on the ACB? Maybe because the dude put his own name down and then girls, thinking it's another girl confessin' her lust for the lad, reconsider him and voila! He's cast a net of gullible female guppies. (Just a theory...OR IS IT?!)

Do they all really share identical taste for, say, Brad Pitt, or that cute guy in physics class? A new study suggests that, in fact, women will look more favourably on the men that other women find attractive.

Ben Jones at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and colleagues, showed 28 men and 28 women pairs of male faces and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photos had been already been rated by 40 women as of about equal attractiveness.

The researchers then showed the same faces alongside a third photo of a female face in profile, positioned so she was looking at one of them, and smiling – or not. The viewers were asked to grade the faces again.

Women found the men who were being smiled at suddenly more attractive, while men who apparently elicited no such smiling approval were pronounced less attractive.

Men, meanwhile, behaved in a strikingly different manner. They rated men who had been smiled at as less attractive. ”Within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes towards men who are the target of positive social interest from women,” the researchers conclude.

Or to put it another way, the next time you hear a man say “I don’t know what she sees in him”, remember the fact she’s sees anything at all may be off-putting enough…

Someone had too much free time over break

Even from the days of ACB I, alternate formats have come but ultimately failed to catch on. Blogspot? Been there. Proboards? Done that. The original Livejournal comment schema has endured, despite numerous and obvious shortcomings. Perhaps its time has come: WesConfess.com is now live.

Welcome to WesConfess.com! If you've used the Wesleyan Anonymous Confession Board (the ACB), we would like to thank you for giving our new format a try. The general concept of the ACB was to provide a place where students could anonymously vent about anything. Wesconfess.com offers improved functionality and usability, but maintains the features of the original ACB.

A few of the notable improvements include:

• Full text search: Have you ever been told that someone saw you in the crush list? Or are you just curious if your name has ever been mentioned on the boards? You are now able to search the entire site for whatever you want.

• Optional Online Identity: On WesConfess, you can create a username that will function as your anonymous online identity. This allows visitors to see anonymous personalities emerge. When using the optional registration, you may provide an email address for notification when someone has responded to one of your posts.

• Better Organization: Threads are ordered by date of last reply, and never get buried from too many comments.

• Thread Ratings: All threads can be rated, so you don't have to waste time reading nonsense (unless you want to!).

I'm extremely impressed that someone not only ponied up the money to buy a domain name but developed it this far. Thread ratings? Search? A freakin' RSS feed?!?! It may be migration time.

It makes sense now

Oberlin is the hung campus on squirrel

Oberlin can't stop feeding the trolls, calls student forum. WesACB points, laughs, goes back to insulting Alpha Delt.

Find Oberlin Confessional's snazzy-yet-defunct page (and a letter from a concerned parent--WTF?) here.

omgwtfbbq

Out: Criticizing someone anonymously on the Anonymous Confession Board.

In: Criticizing someone anonymously for criticizing someone anonymously on the Anonymous Confession Board.