BoredatBaker.com taken offline

BoredatBaker.​com, the pop­u­lar — and con­tro­ver­sial — on­line mes­sage board for Dart­mouth stu­dents, was taken of­fline on Dec. 8 due to an in­flux of "racist com­ments and hate speech” on the site’s sis­ter forum for Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­sity, BoredatButler.​com, ac­cord­ing to site cre­ator and Co­lum­bia alum­nus Jonathan Pap­pas.

Pap­pas, who cre­ated Bored-At on­line fo­rums for 11 uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try, sus­pended all of the sites.

"Re­cently, we've had a very small group of peo­ple ba­si­cally pa­trolling the sites post­ing racist com­ments and hate speech and they were just re­lent­less," Pap­pas said in an in­ter­view with The Dart­mouth.

Al­though the con­tro­ver­sial com­ments were posted only by "one or two" in­di­vid­u­als on the Co­lum­bia cam­pus, Pap­pas said he de­cided to take all of the sites down to pre­vent sim­i­lar at­tacks else­where.

"I de­cided that if the pro­ject wasn’t ma­ture enough to han­dle those sit­u­a­tions, then [the sites] shouldn't be up," he said, stress­ing that his de­ci­sion to sus­pend the sites was not in re­sponse to any ex­ter­nal crit­i­cism.

Users who at­tempt to ac­cess any of the Bored-At sites are redi­rected to a page ex­plain­ing the sus­pen­sion of ser­vice.

Pap­pas said he plans to re­launch the sites after he makes changes to allow the var­i­ous Bored-At com­mu­ni­ties to more ef­fec­tively self-mod­er­ate. He said he is cur­rently as­sem­bling a team of stu­dents to de­velop the pro­ject, adding that he hopes to re­cruit one or two stu­dents from each in­sti­tu­tion rep­re­sented by a Bored-At site in order to gain in­sight on each cam­pus' cul­ture.

Pap­pas said he hopes to avoid im­ple­ment­ing fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms that would pre­vent users from post­ing cer­tain words or phrases.

"I do have a phi­los­o­phy of free speech, but not hate speech," he said.

Al­though plans to re­work the site are still in de­vel­op­ment, Pap­pas said he might focus on im­prov­ing the sites' "trash" func­tion, which al­lowed users to mark posts that they per­ceived as un­suit­able for a pub­lic forum. The fea­ture re­quired mul­ti­ple users to “trash” a post be­fore the com­ment was re­moved.

This func­tion could be mod­i­fied so that cer­tain types of posts are more eas­ily deleted, Pap­pas said, which may in­volve chang­ing the fea­ture so that posts with "a cer­tain type of lan­guage" re­quire fewer users to “trash” it be­fore it is re­moved. Posts by users that have pre­vi­ously had their con­tri­bu­tions “trashed” could also be made "eas­ier to trash," he said.

"The goal is to make [the Bored-At sites] de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally mod­er­ated so that the le­git­i­mate users can han­dle the one or two anom­alies that try to ruin it for every­one else," Pap­pas said.