If you’ve ever wondered which professors are the best, what classes are pitfalls, where to get your car fixed cheaply and where the next big party is, the solution can be found easily with the click of the mouse at www.digitaldiscussion.com.

Digital Discussion gives students a forum to anonymously express their views on anything relevant at their particular college.

Northern Illinois University student Jim Frey first got the idea for the site when he transferred from Southern Illinois University. Frey was looking for someone who could point him in the right direction.

“I didn’t know too many people in my field, computer science,” the 21-year-old college student explained. “So I didn’t know exactly what teachers to stay away from, what classes were good and bad, and things like that.”

Over the summer, Frey pooled the resources from his business, Fidelity Web Site Creators, and created www.digitaldiscussion.com.

The site was launched at the beginning of fall semester and is completely written by students and totally free of censorship and advertising.

Digital Discussion provides a forum for almost every college in the United States and contains boards for each. Over 1,500 colleges are currently in the system, including twenty-nine colleges from Iowa.

If a college has been accidentally omitted, users can submit the name and state of the college and it will be added to the site within days.

“I like the fact that it’s campus-wide instead of nationwide,” Frey said. “Like most sites you can log onto are going to give you a college chat area or something of that nature and it’s college chat for the world, so it’s not too personal. You don’t get the personal touches and the actual questions answered that you would like answered.

“It makes it more interesting when I’m able to read something about what’s happening right in this area and not what’s happening in California or Alaska or somewhere far off that has no bearing on what’s happening in my day to day life,” he continued. “So this way it’s real personal like that because it’s campus wide, there’s a campus system for every campus in the United States.”

The site allows students to post questions and replies to one another on four main boards: General Discussion, Meeting Place, Party Time and Course Tips.

“These four boards kind of hold everything pretty simply.” Frey said.

General Discussion is designed for users to vent about anything that may be on their minds. If users know of a hot spot around campus they want to share they can post it on Meeting Place.

Party Time allows users to advertise when and where the next big party around campus is, while Course Tips is designed to give the students an advantage going into their classes.

“You’re not going to be able to ask questions in the university paper or to a university official on which classes are easy, and what class can I take that I’m going to get and easy ‘A’ in,” Frey said.

“If you logged on and started asking around and if someone knew the answer to your question, which a lot of times happens, you get an answer to something that the university probably wouldn’t even like you to get an answer to. So it makes things simpler for college students in general.”

Digital Discussion is also a forum for artists to submit their drawings for display.

Also featured on the site are Dunce Cap Jokes. Users can sign up and jokes will be e-mailed to them, although users must be 18 years of age or older to sign up.

For now, Frey says his goals are “to be successful and have something where people recognize digitaldiscussion.com.”

“Basically why this site got started is because I could see there was a need for something like it,” Frey said. “We may expand in the future if it gets popular enough, and we may put up a board for every college class on every campus. If that’s going to work out, we’ll do that.”