TuftsLife re-launches site after eight-month hiatus

TuftsLife, which served as the virtual bulletin board for student groups and their events for the past decade, has re-launched this fall after an eight-month hiatus.

Inactive since Feb.1, TuftsLife announced its return on Oct. 6 with a post on its Facebook page that read, "Hello[,] World. It's been a long time."

As of press time, around 20 student groups, including Tufts Amnesty International and Spoken Word Alliance at Tufts (SWAT), had already registered their information on the website.

According to Alex Lenail, the developer behind the revamped website, the new version of TuftsLife is more structurally sound and simple than its predecessors.

“In contrast to the old TuftsLife, we don’t have a huge dashboard of information such as the weather," Lenail, a senior, said. "With events, groups and listings, [students] can filter accordingly.”

The student-created and -operated website's return follows the Tufts administration’s launch of its own Student Life website. Lenail, who is also the president of the Computer Science Exchange, said he considers the university's new Student Life website to be complementary to TuftsLife.

“I’m really happy with it," he said. "I think they are perfect complements because...there are parts of Student Life that aren’t events, groups and listings.”

Student Services Communications Specialist Caitlin Felsman Pfitzer (A'09), who led the development of the administration’s Student Life website, expressed support for an updated TuftsLife and said that she would like for there to be collaboration between TuftsLife and the university.

“I think it’s great for students to have their own web presence,” Pfitzer said. “And I think that both of our resources will be more valuable if we are talking and finding ways to work together."

Pfitzer said that she believes the two websites will have different functions for their users, since the Student Life website doesn't have student-driven listings.

"I think [listings are] a great thing to offer," she said. "I hope [the two websites] attempt to serve slightly different purposes, and then we can collaborate on things that we each lack."

She added that TuftsLife has experienced problems in the past due to turnover of the website's leadership and expressed hope that a stronger connection between TuftsLife and Student Life can help address that. Pfitzer said that TuftsLife, which had been the homepage for lots of students, became a bit difficult to navigate once leaders of the group had changed hands.

"If there’s a better connection between Student Life and TuftsLife, maybe we can help," Pfitzer said. "So that if somebody goes abroad or graduates [from TuftsLife], we can offer resources...to help it keep going.”

Lenail explained that TuftsLife, which currently has a total of three students on its team, has had a long history under the leadership of different students at Tufts.

The website, which was created in 2000, had achieved considerable success in its infancy, but the site disappeared around 2006, according to Lenail. It was rebuilt in 2008 in an effort led by Mike Vastola (E'12).

After Vastola’s departure, however, TuftsLife went into a period of decline, Lenail said. In 2013,Taylor Lentz (A’14) tried to rebuild the website as part of her senior project but was unsuccessful.

According to Lenail, after Lentz left the website's rebuilding process, Tony Cannistra (A’15) and Tara Kola (A'15) attempted to fix the broken website by gathering a collective of students to work together.

Cannistra said that there was a large amount of interest when the club was restarted in the 2013 fall semester, with designers, human factors engineers and programmers attending many of the initial design meetings.

However, the club faced challenges regarding time commitment, since the website required continuous maintenance, according to Cannistra.

“A TuftsLife executive position becomes close to a full-time software development position,” Cannistra told the Daily in an email. “This is a commitment that many people found difficult to sustain, especially when the majority of candidates come from the busy and over-committed population of computer science students ... The difficulty came when real development started, and people had trouble committing to something with so much overhead.”

According to Cannistra, Vastola's departure from Tufts and TuftsLife deeply affected the website, since subsequent leaders lacked Vastola's commitment.

“It was broken, and then no one updated the front page," Lenail said. "For about a year from 2013 to 2014, user numbers just slowly crumbled to the floor."

Since the various efforts to rebuild TuftsLife were not successful, Lenail explained that he took it upon himself during his sophomore year to revamp the student website.

According to Lenail, working alone proved very challenging, and, for a period of time, TuftsLife became inactive. The rebuilding process began to speed up when sophomore Ben Steephenson joined Lenail in the TuftsLife project last spring.

With two people working on the project, the quality of code became much more durable, stable and comprehensible, Lenail said.

Lenail also said that while the developers made great progress in the development of TuftsLife, he faced another challenge with the de-recognition of TuftsLife as a student group by the TCU Judiciary last semester.

According to Lenail, he felt that the administration, which was working on its new Student Life website, wanted TuftsLife gone and was not as helpful as he hoped they would be during the rebuilding process.

“When we were working on TuftsLife, I went into [Director of the Office for Campus Life] Joe Golia’s office, and I told them that we were rebuilding website," he said. "[Golia] said that it was great, but he also told us to slow down because the administration was working on something similar. Two weeks later, he wasn’t answering my emails, and TuftsLife had been de-recognized. I think he had reasons to do so, but he hasn't been the best to us.”

Golia explained that de-recognition of TuftsLife was due to the guidelines and protocols of student organization recognition.

“Departments [and] administrators have no say in the recognition or de-recognition of student organization, and [it] is all done by the TCUJ [TCU Judiciary]” Golia told the Daily in an email. “Over the past few years, we in the [Office for Campus Life] have heard nothing from TuftsLife or any students representing TuftsLife, while attempting several times to find someone involved.”

Golia said he was very up front with Lenail regarding the administration’s website and its progress and that it was Tufts students who worked directly with Pfitzer on the Student Life site. He also said students who were frustrated with the loss of TuftsLife requested similar features from the old TuftsLife be added to the Student Life website.

Pfitzer, the point person behind the Student Life website, also explained that the administration had reached out to TuftsLife several times but did not receive a response for several months. According to Pfitzer, the administration had to take TuftsLife off the server due to limited resources, which were allocated them elsewhere.

Lenail is excited about the new website and eager to introduce it to the Tufts community despite the difficulties TuftsLife has faced in its relaunch.

"I would really like everyone to use it,” Lenail said. “If everyone is on TuftsLife, it becomes more valuable, and if people post a lot of events, it might become a good place to go and learn about these events."

Lenail did express concern, however, that in an environment where Facebook dominates a student platform for finding events, TuftsLife may be superfluous.

"The question for TuftsLife is how do we survive in a place where Facebook exists," he said. "I don't think Facebook events are a good solution to the problem of organizing campus events, but since TuftsLife hasn't existed for the past few years, students have learned to twist Facebook to supply their needs. People also have higher expectations now, and I think holding on to user trust is something I’m definitely afraid of.”

Despite these worries, Lenail said that he isn’t afraid of failure.

“This is the culminating project of my programming experience so far," he said. “I don't think...I’ve [ever] worked on something this hard [in my entire life]. And that’s what TuftsLife means to me ... I’m very prepared for it to fail, and I wont be upset, because I learned so much.”

Correction: The original version of this story mistakenly identified Mike Vastola as a 2012 graduate of the School of Arts and Sciences, when he is in fact a graduate from the School of Engineering. The article has been changed to reflect that.