Anonymous confessions

In May of 2005, right around finals, the oberlin LiveJournal community saw a post inviting people to leave anonymous comments with confessions, secrets, stories, or whatever. It was popular enough that in five days it had received five thousand comments, the maximum number of comments allowed by LiveJournal. Another one was started, but never filled up.

The idea became popular and interesting enough that many more threads like it have been created since then. However, as has been pointed out in many comments and supported by the creation of new threads, the success of the first thread was due to its timing at the end of the semester when people are stressed out and have built up a year's worth of secrets, and threads created over the summer or at the beginning of a semester are rarely as popular.

After one of the later threads, Harris Lapiroff started the Oberlin Confessional, serving as a permanent (maybe?) home to anonymous confessions and comments.

As of May 2, 2008, the original anonymous thread is no longer available. Unflattering mentions that include full names are easily searchable by Google. Complaints were made by people whose potential employers found the site and subsequently didn't hire them, as well as by the friends of an individual who underwent severe strife when their family found the site.

[edit] The threads

1. Anonymous Confession Time (started 11 May 2005; 5000th comment 16 May 2005)
2. Open Thread Part II (started 16 May 2005; not full)
3. anonymity (started 15 September 2005; 5000th comment 16 October 2005)
4. It's that time again... (started 7 December 2005; not full)
5. Anonymous Confessions time! (started 27 April 2006; 500th comment 1 May 2006)
6. More Anonymity!! (started 1 May 2006; 5000th comment 3 May 2006)
7. ANONYMOUS THREAD PART VII: BRIDE OF ANONYMOUS THREAD (started 3 May 2006; 5000th comment 13 May 2006)
8. ANONYMOUS THREAD (started 8 September 2006; not full)
9. An experiment, by popular demand... (started 30 October 2006; not full)
10. Valentines Day Confessional! (started 14 February 2007; not full)