An exclusive interview with the LeedsFess admins

Who am I? That’s a secret I’ll never tell xoxo, LeedsFess

3 years ago

With 32,000 likes, the Facebook page ‘LeedsFess’ is renowned among the Leeds student community. Students can submit anonymous confessions via Uni Truths to be posted on the page.

LeedsFess is by no means unique, as the majority of UK universities now have a confession page, such as Bristruths, Confexeter and Edifess.

From takeaway recommendations and freshers tips, to relationship troubles and annoying housemates – there’s been a lot of Leeds confessions over the years.

Definitely a shower thought

The team behind LeedsFess agreed to have an exclusive interview with The Tab Leeds so we could give you a behind the scenes insight into one of the juiciest pages on Facebook.

Q. Tell us a bit about yourself.

“We’re a team of students from different courses and walks of life, but we can’t say much more than that!”

Q. Have you revealed your identity to anyone?

“My mum knows about it, she helped rate the Christmas dinners when we had a little competition. Anyone else who claims they know someone from our team is lying!”

Student loan blown in one night

Q. How and when did you come up with LeedsFess?

“LeedsFess came about shortly after Bristruths was born. We had contacts there who suggested we start a confession page and the rest is history!”

Q. How many submissions do you receive each day?

“During term time we average around 150 submissions, over summer it goes down to around 50-100, depending on what’s going on that day. We are quite selective, we only accept around 10-15% of submissions.”

Q. How does it feel knowing everyone’s secrets and being the mastermind behind the page?

“Primarily, it’s a massive privilege to be able to control a platform as big as LeedsFess. Some of the confessions we get are deeply personal, and we don’t take the role we have lightly. Many of them make us reflect on the experiences that people go through in their life, which many people see as a taboo to discuss. On the other hand, we love the humorous submissions that we get too!”

Has he not heard of a washing machine?

Q. How do you decide which posts to reject and how do you feel about that?

“Aside from rejecting posts for not being entertaining enough or too similar to another submission we do reject submissions that are too intense sometimes, although this is usually circumvented with the use of content and trigger warnings now.

“We have a keyword detection system that flags up the use of many ‘disturbing’ words which then provides the submitter with a range of resources that may help their situation, we have occasionally edited in a message or reply to a submission too but beyond this we are unable to reach out to submitters due to the anonymous nature of how things are submitted to LeedsFess.”

Q. What’s the most common type of submission you receive?

“Recently we’ve been getting a lot of submissions seeking advice, be it about loneliness, anxiety around what to do after graduating, nightclub recommendations, years abroad, dropping out, etc.

“Aside from that we get submissions about Fruity, and other humourous ones too. With university starting back up we expect to see more submissions about personal experiences, inside jokes and stuff like that.”

It’ll never be the same again

Q. What’s the weirdest/funniest confession you’ve received?

“Poo boy and poo girl has to be up there for both weird and funny! Also a big fan of #leedsfess23228 and #leedsfess23306.

I remember my first pint

Bit awkward

“You spend so long going through submissions you get a bit desensitised to the weird ones, we had one recently asking how much human skin you could flush down the loo, so there’s that.”

Ever so slightly concerning…

Q. Have you received threats to take posts down?

“Thankfully, we haven’t received personal threats (especially as we are anonymous), but we’re always open to a discussion with our followers if they see a post they aren’t comfortable with. We’re students, and we’re human too, so we collectively do our best to not to make mistakes or allow immoral/disrespectful submissions to be posted.

“We have no way of knowing who submits a confession, or any record of IP addresses, locations, etc. Additionally, if specifics are given in a submission, the anonymity of LeedsFess makes sure that we can’t really discuss the submissions with many other people too without giving our role away.”

We have no words