CHICAGO » "You should kill yourself." It’s a message that Vernon Hills, Ill., police officer Jim Koch said he sees "all the time" on the one of the newest social networking sites that allows users to post messages anonymously.

Others include "why r u so ugly? i cant find one attractive thing about u," "ur so (bleeping) ugly and stupid! GO THE HELL AWAY! NO ONE LIKES U," and "whats wrong with ur teeth theyre nasty."

Barely a year old, Formspring.me is quickly turning into a sensation, in part because of teenagers who are attracted by the ability to leave their names off their comments.

Formspring boasts nearly 20 million users around the globe, according to a company spokeswoman. The idea of the site is to have a conversation by answering questions stemming from the prompt "Ask me anything." So far, more than 1.5 billion questions have been answered.

"It’s like a bathroom wall," said Koch, the school resource officer at Vernon Hills High School. "You write whatever you want."

As a result, nearly every day he is calling students in to talk, on the phone with parents or in the hallways hanging up news stories of teens who committed suicide after being on the receiving end of nasty online remarks.

For parents and school officials who are just catching up with Facebook, many are clueless about the relatively new phenomenon.

For some others, the rapidly growing site didn’t have a good introduction. Earlier this year, Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old from New York, committed suicide. She had been the victim of hateful remarks, before and after her death, on Formspring and other social networking sites.

As damaging as some of the remarks can be for teens, they can’t seem to pull themselves away, Koch said. "As horrible as it is, as much as we can tell them to stay off the site, they develop an obsession with knowing what people think," he said.

Formspring spokes-woman Sarahjane Sacchetti touts the site’s many benefits and says Formspring doesn’t want to see the product misused.

An advantage to having such a public site is parents don’t have to dig through text messages or hack into Facebook accounts, she suggested.

"Something that may happen on Facebook can happen behind closed doors," Sacchetti said. "Everything that happens on Formspring is open."

Users, who need an account to post comments, can create one with a username, password and e-mail. The premise is to ask questions — such as "If you could have been the author of any book, what would it have been?" — on people’s pages to learn about them through their answers. The idea is that "curiosity drives engaging, authentic conversations," according to the website. By clicking a box, however, the user asking the question, or making a degrading remark, can become anonymous.

As for anonymity being a bad thing, Sacchetti fundamentally disagrees.

"We think anonymity is very positive," she said. "We think most people use it for good."

About 75 percent of questions aren’t asked anonymously, she said, and users have the option to stop receiving anonymous comments, block the user or report the comment. The site has a section dedicated to safety, including how to know when you’re being harassed and what to do if you feel like you’re being bullied.

In the fast-changing world of social networking, school districts are still trying to catch up. Some don’t have cyberbullying policies in place, while others await legal direction from the courts.

The only way a comment appears on a user’s account is if he or she responds to it. But sometimes the need to defend oneself is more important than keeping the accusation private.

"I can understand the incredible temptation for teenagers to want to monitor what other people are saying about them," said Elizabeth Saewyc, a professor at the University of British Columbia and expert in youth health and bullying. "From the developmental standpoint, it’s that time of life where you’re establishing your identity."

In her research of the long-term effects of bullying, she has found a significant increased risk of suicide.

"I certainly don’t think that most teens want to be so cruel that they lead to someone’s suicide," she said. "When you add anonymity, it adds an additional challenge."