The point of the forum is to allow people in the throes of the graduate admissions process to give and solicit advice. For instance, I recently learned on Grad Cafe that POI means “professor of importance,” and that if you miss a call from the area code of a school to which you applied, you should not necessarily phone your admissions officer immediately (though you should not necessarily not do so, either). But the site’s big draw is its results page, which lists in meticulous detail who got accepted, rejected, or waitlisted where; how they were notified; and when they received the news. (Occasionally it also catalogs test scores and grade point averages.) This information is volunteer-only, and there’s no surefire way to verify its accuracy short of hijacking every mail truck from Chapel Hill to Berkeley, but the litany of hopes realized or dashed is weirdly, mesmerizingly awful.