At the revised bored@butler website, democracy is preserved.
This is what the web team said of the recently relaunched version of bored@butler—the online forum for anonymous student commenting on campus since 2006—which now has new safeguards put in place. One such measure allows users to temporarily ban another user from posting if a comment receives enough “dislikes.”
Despite issues of “trolling” last semester—students posting slanderous and racist comments—B@B founder Jonathan Pappas, CC ’06, said he is confident that these minor changes could revive the website.
He took the site down in December for a few weeks, saying in an open letter, “People troll the site with the purpose of killing the community with slanderous and racist comments ... Service has been temporarily suspended until we can develop the right codes for it to take care of itself.” Comments on the site can cover any topic, from procrastination and Harry Potter, to sexual topics and drunken remarks.
Now, an improved version of the site is up and running again, Pappas said, after it came back online the first week of January.
“Since the life of bored@butler, it’s gone through a bunch of revisions—some failed, some succeeded. Today, it’s back to the 2006 look and feel, the original code,” Pappas said.
He added that the format is also more user-friendly.
His team has implemented safeguards to preserve “democracy” on the site. If anyone posts a comment that many users “dislike,” that person will not be allowed to post for 30 minutes from that location.
“Your stuff will be automatically trashed,” he said. “Take a room full of people having a conversation: if someone walks in and starts screaming, then he will be kicked out.” The website also has closer monitoring from a current student on staff.
The “bored@” trend has spread to many other Ivy League Schools, which have adopted similar sites, but Pappas said he is no longer interested in expansion or advertising. For him, the site is just a hobby.
“It’s there to exist. I don’t care about increasing traffic. It’s bored@butler ... Go there if you are bored,” he said.
Pappas, since the switch, has also given some oversight of the website to Frederick Havemeyer, CC ’13.
“He owns the website, so I’m just going to do what he wants,” Havemeyer said. “It’s not terribly a lot of work.”
But who is actually using the site on campus? Havemeyer said he wasn’t sure who goes to B@B these days.
“I don’t really want to know. I don’t know if anyone does. It’s entirely anonymous,” he said.
Kevin McDonald, SEAS ’12, who works at Butler’s second floor reserves desk, said he never sees people use B@B. “I don’t think people really know much about bored@butler,” he said, adding that he thinks mostly older people or alumni are interested in the site. He said there are other blogs designed for procrastination, such as Texts from Last Night and FMyLife, that are much more popular. “It’s a lot more entertaining, and you get more content on there, too,” he said.
But Pappas said that the site was gaining popularity at the Dartmouth branch, bored@baker, where the activity is tenfold of Butler’s.
“It’s a fraternity-centric community where everyone knows everyone,” he said. “Say a first name and everyone knows who that is.”
Still, on Columbia’s campus, students know of the site, though few admit to using it.
“I’ve seen people use it. I don’t know if you’re going to get anyone to admit it, though,” Evan Drewry, SEAS ’13, said.
Others say they have no interest in it.
Constance Boozer, CC ’13, said she doesn’t think B@B is funny, and prefers to procrastinate on Facebook.
Elizabeth Munroe, CC ’12, said she has only seen B@B once or twice but thinks it is too crass. She added, “I try not get bored at Butler.”
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