Students are using folder names and file names as public announcements. For example, a student might put a folder on the scratch drive called "Last Samurai here plz", asking any student who has the film to upload it to there for her to copy. There's one today called "plzzzz we need the new version of adobe photoshop". There's also a folder called "movies", containing (among other things) a text file with the following name: "can u put ur requests in this (Text document and not folders) cuz we dont know which folder contains something or not and have to enter each ONE.txt"
This is (or was) common practice on filesharing networks - not the p2p kind, but the kinds where you use a client to log onto a network of servers, some of which will let you in for free, others which only let you in if you type in the fifth word of the twentieth line of a website you only get to after viewing a long ad for porn, some which will let you in but won't let you download any warez unless you upload some first, and yet others which only let members or perhaps even friends log in. Of course these servers are there for you to "backup" your applications, music and movies, not for piracy. Though I think the clients often permit chat, there's not much opportunity for chatting - so communication between users and administrative information is all given through the file system. I assume gopher used to work like this before the web, though I never tried it? Jill