By Athena Yeung ’13

Many students have read or received compliments via the Williston Compliments page on Facebook, where peers can submit anonymous compliments about their friends. The page is run by a small group of students at Williston, who we interviewed online this past week. To hear why they want to remain anonymous, and what the page is all about, keep reading!

On your “About” page, you write that Williston Compliments is inspired by projects at other universities, how did you come across those projects?

We found out about these other projects [from] mutual friends who attend schools/universities who have started compliments pages. We thought it was a great idea.

What made you want to start it at Williston?
Often times Facebook can be used in negative ways, we have all heard about the many tragic cyber bullying events that have happened, and we believe that the compliments page is a way to use Facebook as a positive influence and a way to bring the community together in a great way…Since we knew that it was very successful at other schools, we thought we would try it here [at Williston], and so far it has gone amazingly!

I know that more than one person manages the page, how was the group formed?
One of the members had heard about it from a good friend and when they told the rest of the group about it, we all just thought it would be a great idea and started the page.

How many submissions do you get daily?
Since the page really just got “popular”, we receive around 15-20 a day. People seem to be really excited about this new page, but sometimes it is overwhelming. So if your comment is not posted, it is not because we are ignoring it… it is hard to post them all when we receive many a day.

Are the submissions only about students? Do they include faculty and staff?
We plan to make this page just for students, but we will see what happens in the future.

What do you want the community to get out of this page? What is the purpose?
It is easy to look around and see what is not right; we hope this page inspires the community to look for what is positive in people around. As I said before, it is a way to use Facebook as a positive influence.

Has the community been responding in the way you wanted?
For the most part, they have; but we do receive compliments that are obviously sarcastic, mainly about appearance or inappropriate things. When this happens, we write back emphasizing the true mission of the page: This being a place to promote good will in the community and reflect on other strengths bigger than appearances.

Are there fears in running this page? You clearly have put appropriateness into consideration as you wrote on the “About” page reminding people to submit only “clean”, “PG” and “nice” things; what about the inclusion of all students?
Yes, you have addressed our biggest worry [about appropriateness]. But we do monitor the page closely and if we have any doubts about things at all, we leave it out.  Inclusion is very important to us, so, for starters, we make sure we do not post more than one compliment for a person within 24 hours. Another thing we do is to encourage people to “friend” us so we can reach out to a wide range of people.

How will you maximize the longevity of the page? Will you pass it to some other students when you graduate?
We have discussed this many times [among ourselves] and we will have to see what happens. But we think it would be very cool to pass the page on eventually.

Williston Compliments also added that they have been getting lots of questions about who they are, but “the goal of the page is to better the community. We are just posting the great compliments you send in, so please refrain from trying to find out who we are, that doesn’t matter.”

So don’t try to be the Sherlock Holmes here; know someone who deserves a compliment or a shout out? Send it to the page!