LittleGossip.com - Please read

[Synesthesia]

LittleGossip Website and FaceBook page: "We are removing all schools from our database as part of our efforts to stop minors from using Little Gossip: Share and Discuss Latest University & College Gossip. Once this is done - the web site will go live. Students over 18 years old from universities and colleges and folks in organizations are welcomed to use the site".

 

Update: they haven't succeeded yet - several schools with College in their name are still there, as are others. Looks like a very amateur operation has been brought to book by the lawyers. No doubt the papers will enjoy this tomorrow.

 

It's well past beer o' clock and I'm off to bed.

Edited December 22, 2010 by Synesthesia
Update

[clintoj]

I'd been emailing them all week about "issues" with their website, they had refused to remove our school, but were offereing for me to be able to send them links to threads for them to remove them, but this involved me sitting sifting through all of the posts, the site is blocked by us via websense, but the kids are at home and most parents don't have any filtering.

Yesterday i was talking with them about legal procedings should a threat posted be carried out, they said they record all email addresses as users post, and that is their only tracking method

I was able to post a comment using the email [email protected] and told them to trace that and see how far that helped the authorities with any investigations brought about by what is posted on their site

I was also able to not tick the I'm over 18 box and still have the message appear

They said they were "investigating content filtering" but according to their facebook post of 18 dec 2010 this is already in place

I Personally feel this is set up by some kids who have no idea what they are doing , have no legal clue, or any morals

[PiqueABoo]

Well done fellow EduGeekers

 

Akshully.. I think it might have been the Power of Mumsnet[tm] wotdunnit, for instance one mum posted: "I have been going on it and writing positive messages and encouraging people to not write nasty gossipy things."

 

If this isn't a permanent outage i.e. it comes back, then I would skip the clueless folk who made the site and go to their web-hosting company instead: That's apparently Midphase Hosting who say this violates their AUP: "Distributing hate speech, or any other content that is obscene, abusing, which could be considered libelous and defamatory."

Edited December 23, 2010 by PiqueABoo

[elsiegee40]

This has come from the ISC (Independent Schools Council) today:

 

In the end-November ISCnews we warned you about the LittleGossip website. It has been offline for amendment, but is now online again. The over-18 filter they have fitted is a simple click-through box, so it affords no protection from under-18s accessing the site. And despite assurances that schools were to be removed from the site there are still many schools listed there.

 

We advise you to check the site to see if your school still appears. A particular problem is schools with "College" in their title. If you are listed you could contact the site owners via the contact address on the site and ask for your school to be removed and for any future listing or reference to be blocked. You could remind the owners of their declared policy of restricting use to universities and FE colleges and stress that you are a school.

 

You may also want to consider whether you should take action with pupils during the holiday period. One possibility would be to alert your parents to the site and ask them to consider discussing cyber-bullying with their children. The key message would be that no-one is immune to being targeted because of the way the site is set up. However you may consider that this is a risky strategy because it could generate further interest in the site.

 

A possible alternative approach would be for your school to hold a meeting for parents about the risks associated with the internet and new technologies, perhaps using LittleGossip as a case study. You could then explain to parents your strategy for dealing with these risks and communicate to parents how they can support their children at home.

 

How you wish to react will depend on your own school's particular policy towards IT issues. Some are more liberal or relaxed than others.

[tech_guy]

I see that this dreadful website is up and running again. There is some nasty material on there.

[Koocha]

It's gone now