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BY MATT BLEIMAN

In print | Published March 6, 2008

Last week, a new link appeared on the Student Dashboard to SwatBBS, a forum designed by Ben Zhang ’10 to facilitate discussion among Swarthmore students in a more organized manner than on other sites such as the Daily Jolt.

Zhang said that bulletin board systems similar to SwatBBS are very popular in China, where he is from, and that they make it very easy to reach out to people you don’t know. “You may find people as equally passionate as you,” he said.

As of mid-afternoon Wednesday, SwatBBS had 162 posts, 99 topics and 84 registered members.

According to Zhang, although The Phoenix and The Daily Gazette are good sources for the spread of information on campus, SwatBBS provides a less formal venue for the dissemination of news and ideas. It is Zhang’s hope that people who just want to talk about a specific issue and write a small paragraph here and there about something they are interested in can use SwatBBS as an alternative medium.

The site uses a PHP platform and is a moderated forum. “I made it really easy to do multimedia posting,” Zhang said. “You can post pictures, YouTube videos, links and all kinds of stuff. I tried to make it really flexible and versatile.”

The site is designed to be accessible exclusively to members of the Swarthmore community, Zhang said.

In response to suggestions from other students, Zhang set up a registration system with the help of Stephan Hoyer ’08 that requires users to register with their Swarthmore usernames. A new poster must enter his or her email address as the username and then the site sends an activation code to that address.

Hoyer said it was important to require students to use their real names on the site, distinguishing it from other online discussion forums that already exist, like the Daily Jolt and comments on The Gazette.

“This is an opportunity for responsible and personal discussion online at Swarthmore, and it follows a successful model from a number of similar schools, including Haverford’s Go Boards (go.haverford.edu) and online forums at Wellesley College.” Hoyer hopes that the site can become popular enough so that student groups feel comfortable utilizing the forum to stimulate discussions relevant to their organizations.

Zhang believes that his site will be useful because it will reflect student interests. “I really want student input,” he said. “I put a lot of thought into categories and I want to know if people want more or less.”

SwatBBS is currently recruiting moderators, designers and others to help with the site. Hoyer, who has been a programmer and administrator on another large online forum, has helped with the project but as a second-semester senior is also busy planning for the future. “It would be great if Ben could get some help from other experienced PHP programmers and those who have run online forums before,” he said.

In addition to administrators for the forum, Zhang hopes to get other contributors to the site.

“It is a good medium to publish things — you can hear everything. I hope in the future to add music from Swarthmore musicians, hold literary contests with professors helping with commentary and other projects,” he said.

Zhang drew a clear distinction, however, between SwatBBS and the Daily Jolt. “The Daily Jolt forum has a very linear structure — structurally it’s really bad. Topics also tend to be vulgar and not useful. People vent anger and discuss topics anonymously,” he said. “Also, the Daily Jolt is a nationally syndicated site so the makers are behind the scenes. On the other hand, we want to adapt the BBS to students. I really look into student input.” Swat BBS is also noncommercial and non-profit.

Jon Peters ’09, who helped with ideas for the site, was very enthusiastic about the project. “As I understand it, many other colleges have similar message boards that are specific to students,” Peters said.

As of now, there has not been much publicity for the site, though Zhang was able to have a link to SwatBBS added to the Student Dashboard.

According to ITS Manager of Web Projects Kelly Mueller, the web team decides what goes on the dashboard by considering student priorities and needs and tries to be flexible and transparent. “The feedback we receive plays the largest role in determining what to include. We are inclined to add content that gets requested multiple times if there is a feasible way to do it,” Mueller said.

Mueller indicated that students in the past have requested that the dashboard link to forums similar to SwatBBS, and that the web team wanted to give SwatBBS a chance to see if it would become an active student forum.

“For now, the SwatBBS is a temporary presence on the dashboard. We wanted to give the students working on the project a chance to build and establish the service,” she said. “Whether it stays on the dashboard depends on whether students actually use it.”

Other student forums, specifically the Daily Jolt, are not on the dashboard due to a lack of expressed interest to add them. Mueller said that no one has ever requested that it be added. In the case that such a site was requested, a broader decision making process would be used to see if it should be added.

Zhang is currently working to promote student interest in SwatBBS. “[SwatBBS is] not a big thing right now, but I expect students to get interested,” Zhang said. He has put up posters and will be tabling during the week.

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