MADISON — Earlier this semester, an anonymous poster on a college gossip website posed a question to Drew University students: Who are the fattest people on campus?

"Call ’em out!" the poster said.

When a Drew freshman saw her name on the site, followed by cruel comments about her weight, she was devastated, her family said. The 19-year-old called her parents in tears and considered transferring out of the Madison university. Her parents e-mailed the website, called university officials and filed a complaint with the state Attorney General’s Office to get the posts removed.

They didn’t get very far. As of today, the comments were still on the website for anyone to see.

The site, CollegeACB.com, is popular among gossip websites that give students free rein to post anything they want about their campuses and peers. Typical posts ask users to name the "hottest freshman girls" or "who’s gay on campus."

The owners of CollegeACB — which stands for College Anonymous Community Boards — are unapologetic about their site, which has pages for more than 500 campuses nationwide.

"Why anonymity? Because everyone has something that they’re afraid to say out loud," the site’s mission statement says. "We’ll be there when you want to write without responsibility."

The gossip site, which was recently purchased by new owners who have gone to great lengths to remain anonymous, has been drawing increasing scrutiny in recent months. In Nebraska, Creighton University blocked CollegeACB.com on campus computers last semester. In Atlanta, Emory University students organized a petition calling for classmates to pledge to boycott the site. In New York, the president of the University of Rochester e-mailed students, asking them to consider how posting on the site hurts their classmates.

Drew University President Robert Weisbuch sent a similar letter to his campus in February, calling on students at the 2,700-student private university to boycott CollegeACB.

"These postings result in fear, anger, mistrust and shame in individuals who are named. By that, they destroy the safe and supportive environment we so value at Drew for learning and the free expression of ideas," the letter said.

The site came to the attention of Drew officials when they were contacted by the parents of the distraught freshman named in the post about overweight students in February.

The student’s father said he e-mailed CollegeACB to get the posts naming his daughter removed. The site removed one comment but left the remainder of the thread, including comments using the student’s full name, he said.

"What they did was put up a place where cowards can hide behind anonymity. I was appalled," said the Monmouth County father of three, who asked that his name not be used to spare his daughter further embarrassment.

Federal law shields website owners from being legally responsible for information, including anonymous gossip, posted by site users. The Drew student’s family forwarded their complaints to the state Attorney General’s Office, hoping the case would be covered by New Jersey’s anti-bullying or harassment laws.

Rachel Goemaat, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office, declined to discuss whether the state is investigating CollegeACB.

"We neither confirm nor deny investigations," she said.

When asked whether the site has been contacted by New Jersey law enforcement authorities, CollegeACB’s owners said "no comment."

New Jersey has a history of cracking down on college gossip websites. In 2008, Attorney General Anne Milgram announced the state was investigating another gossip site, JuicyCampus.com, after a Princeton University student said she was being terrorized by someone posting on the site. The state subpoenaed JuicyCampus’ records and advertisers, citing consumer fraud laws.

Within days, Connecticut’s attorney general launched a similar consumer fraud investigation. JuicyCampus, which was owned by a Nevada company, went out of business in 2009 as multiple lawsuits loomed and advertisers fled.

JuicyCampus’ owners redirected the site’s traffic to CollegeACB, a nearly identical site started by Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins University students in 2008. Peter Frank, another Wesleyan University student, purchased the site a year later and took it national. Frank sold the site in January to new owners, who have kept their identity secret.

When contacted by e-mail, the new owners declined to reveal their names or any personal details. They also refused to be interviewed by phone, saying their policy was to speak to the media only via the internet. The CollegeACB.com domain name is registered under the address of a Florida privacy service used by website owners who want to shield their names in public records.

"We think that conversations about the site owners are an asinine waste of time. We want our audience to concentrate discussions on how to improve the site and not to obsess over our personal biographies," CollegeACB’s owners said via e-mail.

They also defended how the site handles complaints from users who object to CollegeACB’s posts.

"We try to handle complaints promptly and fairly," the owners said.

It is unclear if CollegeACB is drawing a profit. The free site has about 450,000 unique users a month, but all of the advertising space currently is being donated to charitable causes, including Doctors Without Borders, the owners said.

When asked if their site is in danger of losing money, as JuicyCampus.com did before it folded, CollegeACB’s owners admitted gossip isn’t paying so far.

"We’re probably going to lose much more money than they ever did," they said.