Yik Yak, the anonymous social media messaging app continues to soar in popularity and now has 3.6 million users across 1,500 college campuses according to Business Insider. While the use of social media is, for the most part, constructive to the academic and social experience for students, Yik Yak’s rising popularity is somewhat disconcerting. Multiple controversies have surrounded the mobile app, ranging from school lockdowns, harassment cases and even student arrests which is compelling some institutions to seek out alternatives to control or eliminate its use on campus.

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Yik Yak to Roll Out New Anonymous Photo Sharing Feature

Yik Yak’s founders recently announced a new anonymous photo sharing feature that will allow users to upload and share images to users within a 1.5 mile radius. This feature evolution is likely to increase the amount of Yaks posted across campus networks and amplify the controversy surrounding the app. College IT departments looking to contain Yik Yak require a tool to monitor and control how social applications of all types behave on the network.

Limiting the Impact of Recreational Traffic on Campus Networks

Yik Yak is just one of many recreational applications that can have a negative impact on the overall campus experience if left unmanaged. Social media, peer to peer file sharing and streaming video applications can congest the network, introduce copyright infringement liability, and degrade the performance of online learning and administrative applications. One way to protect the integrity of the campus network and prevent misuse of specific social applications is to set bandwidth policies to limit or prevent bandwidth allocation to apps like Yik Yak while guaranteeing bandwidth to learning apps like Blackboard.

Creating a Campus Bandwidth Policy to Control Yik Yak

Our friends at VistaOne made a short demo video that walks through how to quickly create a policy using the Yik Yak application signature to control users Yakking on your network.

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