Under a r/gwu thread titled “Amount of straight vs gay guys?” a prospective student asked if she’d be able to find love at GW as a straight woman. Current students provided their honest advice: “I don’t have a pulse on the gay/straight ratio but I will say that dating here is rough.”

The r/gwu forum, a hub for all things admissions, campus gossip and dining hall grievances, has gone through its fair share of moderators since its 2010 launch. Under the randomly generated pseudonym u/Plane_Vanilla_8832, a 2024 international affairs graduate, has overseen the message board since June 2023, organizing the forum — which tackles everything from class recommendations to SGA elections — and deleting harmful content.

Plane Vanilla, a graduate student in Europe, requested anonymity because of her past involvement in the Student Government Association and fears that people may assume her moderating is biased due to her prior student leadership role. She said she was an active user of the forum throughout her time at GW, answering questions about campus culture and University policies that often came from prospective students.

She said her on-campus job and SGA involvement made her “very knowledgeable” on all things GW, prompting her to apply for the moderator position through a Google Form when more were needed in summer 2023. Previous moderators selected her to take over the position, noting that the Reddit algorithm displays a list of users that interact most with the page, and Plane Vanilla was in the top five.

“I thought it’ll be amazing if I involve myself to be a moderator on this page, because I am one of those psychotic students that love to know everything about the University,” she said. “I was essentially my own academic advisor.”

Plane Vanilla said she runs the message board alongside another active moderator under the name u/kaheye, a GW Law student. She said the forum used to be “jam-packed” with moderators when she began the position, and they used to use a Discord server to communicate, but the number of active moderators has dwindled over time due to a lack of interest and moderators graduating from the University. 

“He texted me randomly, right, ‘We’re the last two left,’” she said. “Very ominous.”

She said she would like to step back from moderating now that she’s graduated but she hasn’t because she doesn’t know how to “start the process” of granting moderating access to another person. She said she has to reach out to friends at GW to understand campus happenings and inform her moderating. She added that her fellow moderator has been ghosting her questions about how to transition access, making her feel stuck in the role until she finds a solution.

U/kaheye said they became a moderator over a year and a half ago as they used the platform to “vent” about experiences on campus. They said due to the political nature of GW, a lot of it translates to the online platform. They said because there have been several moderators, they have to uncensor comments due to biases of each person.

“It’s not an official subreddit for the school, so we kinda have a laxed leniency on most discussion topics — however harsh they may be against the school,” they said.

Plane Vanilla said she spends about an hour a week answering and reviewing comments, ensuring that the users follow the posted rules, including “Be considerate,” “No Solicitations,” “Ask Admissions,” “No Room Swap Posts” and “No copypasta.” She said during last spring’s pro-Palestinian encampment, the message board, which was once “a lot more lighthearted,” grew more intense in various threads, with users arguing on the forum and using hateful language. She said her time commitment ramped up to around five hours a week during the encampment.

“I do feel qualified in the way of addressing what I believe is freedom of speech but I do find it very objective at moments as well,” she said in a message.

She said the discourse caused her to enforce stricter rules by deleting posts or banning users from the forum to moderate the conversations, which can be difficult due to the heightened amount of disagreement online.

“We will be more vigilant in moderating this year, and any violations of our rules will be addressed firmly. We expect all members to act with common courtesy and respect towards one another. Disregarding these standards could result in bans being issued more frequently,” she wrote in a Reddit post eight months ago.

She said while some of the forum’s rules that are posted on the main page of the website, like “be considerate” and “no room swap posts,” existed before her tenure, she established the “ask admissions” rule, stating “We don’t know if you’ll get into the university. Contact [GW Admissions] (https://www.gwu.edu/contact-gw) if you have questions related to applying” to ward against the flood of prospective students asking about GPAs and SAT scores.

“I added that rule because I was so f*cking annoyed with those damn kids,” she said. “I am so sorry, you and every kid with a 1400 SAT and your 3.7 GPA, I’m not an admissions member.”

Plane Vanilla said the forum has seen its fair share of controversies, like SGA elections, where users often dramatized events and constantly updated the forum. She said the 2023 SGA, known as the Student Association at the time, election in particular was “really difficult,” dealing with users bashing on the candidates, including homophobic sentiments.

The 2023 SGA election, marked by record-low voter turnout, two election date delays, candidate disqualifications and multiple rounds of ranked-choice voting, fostered intense campus discourse, which Plane Vanilla said transferred to the message board.

“It was so odd to me that they’re taking this so seriously and using Reddit as if it’s CNN, breaking news,” she said.

Plane Vanilla said her favorite posts are when students ask about professors and classes, especially when students bond over “suffering” in certain classes and that she enjoys being a “hater” on macroeconomics professors because they are “notably sh*t at GW.” She said the online forum is a way for students to chat with one another about all things GW, even when the school spirit and community are not high most of the time, bonding over their frustrations with the University and giving advice to other users.

She said not all questions are valid, though, and takes it into her own hands to remove them. 

“It was meant to be genuinely, ‘No question is a stupid question,’” she said. “But obviously there were stupid questions. You do try to weed out the obviously stupid ones.”