The Dartmouth

Gos­sip fiends at Dart­mouth and other Ivy League in­sti­tu­tions will have to seek new venues to con­tinue their anony­mous post­ing — BoredatBaker.​com, the in­fa­mous on­line mes­sage board for Dart­mouth stu­dents, and its par­al­lel sites have been taken of­fline due to con­cerns re­gard­ing their con­tent, ac­cord­ing to an open let­ter writ­ten by Jon Pap­pas, the sites’ cre­ator.

The sites have re­cently been used by a “small group of peo­ple” to post at­tacks on spe­cific in­di­vid­u­als “in a re­peated, per­sis­tent man­ner,” Pap­pas wrote. The at­tacks in­cluded per­sonal in­for­ma­tion — such as phone num­bers and e-mail ad­dresses — and ma­li­cious state­ments, ac­cord­ing to the let­ter.

“It is clear that [Bored-at] is not ma­ture enough to mod­er­ate or con­trol it­self well,” Pap­pas said in the let­ter.

Pap­pas wrote that the Bored-at sites are not and were never in­tended to be a venue for post­ing per­sonal at­tacks.

“Since I dont [sic] have a so­lu­tion for this prob­lem right now, like I’ve done in the past, I’ve de­cided to take down the sites for the time being,” Pap­pas wrote.

Per­sonal at­tacks be­came a prob­lem for some Dart­mouth stu­dents when the site launched in 2006, The Dart­mouth pre­vi­ously re­ported.

The site was pre­vi­ously taken of­fline in 2007 after Pap­pas tried to redi­rect post­ing to a newer ver­sion of the site that never be­came pop­u­lar,but the orig­i­nal Bore­dat­Baker site was re­launched in 2009. Stu­dents brought the site to the at­ten­tion of Dart­mouth ad­min­is­tra­tors after the re­launch due to its dam­ag­ing con­tent, The Dart­mouth pre­vi­ously re­ported.

Pap­pas’ July 8 let­ter orig­i­nally stated that the sites’ focus on “ho­mo­sex­u­als look­ing for anony­mous hookups,” was an­other rea­son for the sites’ dis­con­tin­u­ance. Pap­pas later re­moved all ref­er­ences to ho­mo­sex­u­als from the let­ter.

“Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have any­thing against ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity,” Pap­pas wrote in the orig­i­nal let­ter. “How­ever, its [sic] not what I in­tended to be the pri­mary focus of the site(s).”

The most com­mon top­ics of dis­cus­sion on Bore­dat­Baker are re­lated to the Greek sys­tem or are sex­ual in na­ture, The Dart­mouth pre­vi­ously re­ported.

Pap­pas pre­vi­ously told The Dart­mouth that he did not in­tend to cre­ate a gos­sip site, but that the Col­lege’s cul­ture “may turn it into that.”

Posts re­fer­ring to in­di­vid­u­als by name were more preva­lent on Bore­dat­Baker than on its cousin sites — Bore­dat­But­ler at Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­sity and Bore­dat­La­m­ont at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity — and Bore­dat­Baker was the most ac­tive site over­all, Pap­pas said.

The Bore­dat sites were first in­tro­duced at Co­lum­bia — Pap­pas’ alma mater — in Feb­ru­ary 2006 and came to Dart­mouth in the fall of that year.