(continued)

It's hard to understand how a mere appeal to conscience could, on its own, inspire such an outpouring of bile and keystrokes, but Rees insists he has no enemies that he's aware of, no one with a motive to smear him. "I can't pinpoint a time in my college career that I've done anything that would make people as angry with me as they appear to be on this website," he says. "I just haven't made that many ripples. I'm the guy who's nice, who tries to say hi to people." Rees has considered the possibility that a single antagonist with a grudge is authoring most of the comments, but even so, he can't point to a suspect: "I literally have no idea who these people are."

This isn't what Matt Ivester, the founder and owner of Juicy Campus, had in mind. Not exactly, anyway. Ivester debuted his creation at seven pilot schools last October, two years after graduating from Duke University, where he double-majored in economics and computer science. A member of Sigma Phi Epsilon—the same fraternity as J.D. Rees—Ivester was active in Greek life as an undergrad, at one point serving as the vice president of the Interfraternity Council. Immediately after graduation, he worked in Manhattan as a strategy consultant, but, having grown up in Silicon Valley during the tech boom of the 1990s, he "always wanted to start an Internet company," he says. "I've always known this was what I wanted to do. I'm kind of living my dream." In the past nine months, the site has colonized a total of 63 schools, with plans to expand to several hundred more this fall.

But in the short time it's been around, Juicy Campus has taken on a life of its own, one that may be beyond the control of its founder. If you are female and anything short of gorgeous at one of the schools in Juicy's network, for example, you now have reason to live in fear: "She's a stinky ugly Jew with a hopelessly oily face, deformed looking mouth, and droopy tits," wrote one UCLA poster recently, naming "the most hated slut on campus." At Columbia University, another young woman was awarded Ugliest Girl of '08. "This girl is so gross," reads a comment, "her face looks like the Andes with all those zits and pimples. Ewww ... so gross."

Then there's the University of California Santa Barbara student who "has a fucking extra toe." Or the "Biggest Cornell Cokehead." Or members of Vanderbilt's largely Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, who woke up one morning to the following post: "We need to send a German professor over to that Jew hive to gas the whole house. Hit the showers, boys. Then we pile their shoes out on the sidewalk as a warning to others." Or the "red-headed dance team slut" at Penn State: "You've all seen her. Big monkey ears?... Or perhaps you've seen her slutting around Nittany Apartments fucking people's boyfriends, because she does that too." Three comments later, a user identified the woman by name.

In both design and function, Juicy Campus is almost laughably primitive, nothing more than a bulletin board for people to initiate and comment on discussion threads. Its "killer app" is extreme anonymity. Users aren't required, or even allowed, to register or provide screen names, and the site doesn't associate a computer's IP address, or unique signature, with anything a user writes. Those who have a heightened interest in concealing their identities can even find advice in the site's privacy statement on how to further cover their tracks.