Issue date: 12/4/06 Section: News

Media Credit: Daniel Schwartz/DP Photo Illustration [Click to enlarge]

Move over, Mark Zuckerberg.

There's a new Web site in town, and it promises all the discussion about sex, drugs and procrastination a student could ever want. BoredatVanPelt.com, a recently launched Web site that functions as an anonymous message board, has become the latest way for Van Pelt Library junkies to put off their work just a little bit longer.

The posts range from solicitations for sex in the stacks to ruminations on the Penn-Princeton rivalry to questions on how to get the best weed on campus.

The free Web site was launched last month by Columbia University alumnus Jonathan Pappas and is only accessible to Penn students, who must submit their school e-mail address when registering.

So what do Ivy League kids talk about at 3 a.m. when they're bored?

Plenty.

"It's 1:36 in the afternoon and I'm already smoking a bowl," reads one post from Nov. 21.

"I'm really sexually frustrated," said another Nov. 21 user, while a Nov. 17 post called all a cappella groups "a waste of SAC funding."

All the posts are submitted anonymously, and registered users can respond to them by clicking on red "disagree" and green "agree" tabs.

BoredatVanPelt is one of nine bored-at sites, all of which feature their respective school's library in their URL.

Pappas first created BoredatButler.com - after Columbia's Butler Library - last February.

Encouraged by his immediate success, Pappas later launched sites at Stanford and New York universities and all of the Ivies except for Brown University, "which doesn't seem to care" that it's not represented, he said.

"I don't think I'm going to open up at other schools," Pappas said. "It's pretty exclusive to the Ivies."

Some schools' students are a bit more direct than their Penn counterparts.

"Are you a guy?" "No, I'm a girl" "Wanna go make out?" read a string of posts from the Harvard page yesterday morning.

To date, Columbia leads the pack with 34,302 posts, while Harvard has 31,160. Penn brings up the rear with a measly 162 posts.

While Pappas acknowledges that advertising would make his sites more well-known, he has no immediate plans to do more with them.

"Nobody wants another conglomerate Web site," he said. "I think I'm just going to stop here; maybe MIT will have a site soon."

The site may be no Facebook, but students admit it could become addictive.

"I haven't used the site yet, but it's nice to see that other people suck at doing work too," College junior Natasha Chavdaroff said. "It's just something else to distract you at the library."

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