A while back, during all of that music hacker stuff, I shared a project containing a message I sent to the Scratch Team. Unsurprisingly, it was taken down quite quickly. I've been thinking, and I'm going to send them another message. Not about just hackers, but all the problems with the website, and the safety of the people who use it. You can choose to read this, or not. It's up to you. I know I write these "essays" a lot. I'd also like to say that I will be blocking out information that may get this project taken down, to try to let as many people as possible read it. With that said, the message is in the Notes and Credits.
Let me start by saying this: you can completely ignore me if you want to. You can remove my projects, ban me, whatever you want. But I just want SOMEONE to know about the problems the Scratch community is facing. Also, this will mainly be based on my opinions, but for some things I know a lot of people agree with me. First of all, the moderation. I'm sure you've gotten plenty of people asking you to fix the moderation. And, whether it's a human or not, my projects explaining the moderation are taken down frequently. (If there's a "repeat offenders" list for Scratch, I'm most definitely on it. And I don't want to be.) For the most part, the moderation is fine. The Scratch Team finds a project or user that needs to be removed, and they do so. But a lot of the time the projects are removed for reasons that don't make much sense. Back during the incident with the [___] (I still am not sure if that was a real hack), my project telling people to beware was removed. I will take the blame for the copy-pasta directing people to my project. Being 100% honest though, I had no idea it would reach almost 1,000 people. But that's not why you (or they, or it; it depends on how your moderation works) removed my project. It was because [___] and for [___] First of all, I understand that MOST accounts [___] (bot-created accounts are definitely a thing), but I wasn't calling anyone out. I was listing the people who gave me information, the people who's accounts were supposedly stolen, and one person who was spamming. I did this to make sure Scratchers were careful about what links they were clicking. And second, I was not [___] This was a real thing that happened. Projects have been removed many times for nonsense reasons like this. The muting/comment-blocking is also getting out of hand. You'll just be having a regular conversation with someone, and then out of nowhere you're muted for 10 minutes. Most of the time, the reasons are understandable (for example saying [___] or [___]), but I wish it was more clear WHAT got the comment removed, instead of just why. The explore page is broken. Most of Scratch knows that. It barely updates, it's full of [___] projects (which I'm not saying is BAD, but it was strange when they suddenly were everywhere), and people abuse it for advertising. I have absolutely no idea how hard it would be to fix it, but it has to be done somehow. It would solve most of these problems. And now, possible the most serious of these problems: the security. People are hacking cloud variables and users. I've seen many projects with [___] and [___] in their names or in the projects themselves that haven't been removed by the filterbot or the Scratch Team. There are [___] with [___] in their names. [___] things are slipping by the filterbot by being put in projects rather than textboxes. I'm concerned about the younger users of Scratch, and what may happen if these problems continue. I don't want to be treated like a child. I don't want you to redirect me to forum threads or community guidelines. I want to have a real conversation with a real human being on the Scratch Team. These are problems that need to be fixed. I am begging SOMEBODY to just listen to what I have to say instead of passing me off as just another kid. I'm going to be sharing a project with this message, with certain things removed to try to stay within the community guidelines. I don't want it to be taken down, so others can hear about the issues and help fight for the cause. I'm telling you, Scratch is falling fast.
