100 FOLLOWER ACCOUNT BANNED WTF?
Ok, I have a bit of a long story so buckle in.
I really like the way the coding works. Coming from the point of view of someone who has basically no experience with code, it works pretty well. The tools are easy to learn and I'm a bit better at coding now.
The scratch moderator team sucks. Let me tell you my story on this website.
I started a religion as a joke. It was called "Clickstianity" and it was really funny. I was very clear that I was not discriminating against other religions, I was very nice to literally everyone, and I got permanently banned.
First, my original animation about the religion was taken down automatically because people mass-reported it. They said they would put it under review and that it should be back up soon. It never came back up. I made a new animation, same thing happened. The newest one I made did not actually taken down, which was good because I spent a lot of time on it. One user, was overly christian and was harassing me about my religion calling it "fake" and a "cult". I told someone else about this through scratch and was banned for a week for "spreading rumors". I waited out my week ban and got back. I made some more projects and eventually got 100 followers. There were always people who would be toxic and hate on me, but I dealt with it. A few days later I was banned AGAIN for "spreading rumors". Whenever you get banned, it shows an example of the message that got you banned. I got banned for the same message that I already got banned for! I wrote an appeal, it only took them a few days to respond. Their response:
Hi there,
The Scratch website is a website that serves as an educational resource for children and their parents, teachers and their students, and people new to programming to learn about programming skills. But when we see users who have been blocked and notified so many times, we start thinking that they're not really interested in Scratch anymore, and we can no longer trust them.
Based on your past history on the Scratch website, we don't think you'll be able to follow our Community Guidelines. Your account(s) will not be unblocked. Please do not use or make any Scratch accounts.
Why? They then proceeded to IP ban me, and any of my fans who were associated with the religion. Someone was literally accusing me of being a p*dophile, I reported him, and do you know how long he got banned? FOUR HOURS!
Most reviews about the Scratch website make the mistake of reviewing Scratch as both a programming language and a website. These two things should be kept separate. Parents need to decide whether to let their child create a Scratch userid and participate on the website.
Scratch is a social media website where children role play and chat about topics that include puberty and sexual orientation. They sometimes use the embedded software to make presentations about their lives and interests. This software has some minimal programming features and therefore also allows children to reproduce games by copying the instructions from books or videos.
Some members will figure out that getting front-page recognition is reserved mostly for people who learn to merchandise themselves and their projects. They have to work the community. They learn that they have to beg or trick others into liking their projects, constantly ask people to recommend their projects for front page slots, and find ways of tricking the algorithm to allow their projects to be displayed on the first page of trending projects. It might be true that learning to merchandise their work is a useful skill but is that what you expected when you let them use the Scratch website.
Parents should also be concerned with how easy it is for children to pirate copyrighted music. The Scratch team assumes that there exists a fair use defense for any project that includes copyrighted music. However, the Scratch website makes it very easy for your child to extract just the music into music format files on your home computers. This is piracy and the Scratch teams' reply to this is that every child needs to know the copyright laws in their local area. Parents and school administrators should be concerned about how easy it is for Scratch to allow illegal music in common music formatted files to be stored on their home or school computers.
If Scratch, the language, is used in school then it seems a bit of a waste. Scratch is free but school time is not. It would be better if school districts used a language that didn't run out of concepts to teach. The Scratch team does not want students to know about data structure so nothing about tables can be taught. They don't want students to know that procedures can be made once and used anywhere in a program. They don't want students to know about functions. They don't want students to know that arrays can be passed as arguments to a subroutine.
The Scratch team says that the language is specifically designed for the age range from 8 to 16 but every suggestion that would allow the language to have more educational value to the upper age range is countered with "but that would confuse our 8 year old users". That means that Scratch as an educational product is designed for 8 year olds. Parents and school administrators should keep that in mind before selecting Scratch as a tool for learning programming.
Answer: It's actually pretty easy. First of all, some people might be very mean to you and mass-report you (That's how I got banned) and then Scratch Team sees this. They don't take time to look at your history, they only see the mass-reporting problems. So then they ban you. Second of all, Scratch Team is super sensitive and kind of overprotective about their already decaying community. So whenever they see something that might harm people in a mental way or something that is "disturbing" to others, they'd ban you.
Answer: When it comes to server issues, Scratch is really trying it's best to keep up with it's servers, but there's way too many comments in their database, Scratch needs funding to resolve these issues to keep running.
Answer: Scratch's servers are trying to keep up, but they run with way too much information in their database. This could be fixed by getting rid of old data (not recommended) or rolling out the solutions they've done much to the hatred of users... Also not a good answer. Scratch just needs a lot more funding to solve this issue, so long answer short; not enough funding, and too much information in too small a database, leading to that in the servers.
Answer: It can vary. Sometimes it can take only one. Other times it can take more. It's not always good to mass report, though. It's more likely to be taken down if it actually breaks the guidelines.
Answer: Here's my list: If you got banned on the website ONCE, and you contact Scratch Team, you will MOST LIKELY get your account back if you agree to be nice again on the website. If you got banned on the website TWICE, and you contact Scratch Team, it's 50/50. It's a mix between MOST LIKELY and HIGHLY UNLIKELY to get your account back. If you got your IP Address banned, your siblings (If you have any) will get their accounts banned because they use your IP Address, and the chances of you getting you account back is BORDERLINE IMPOSSIBLE. You can't contact Scratch Team any way, whether using their contact email or just asking Scratch Team. You can't even comment on their Youtube Channel, because they disable comments on their videos. And, like getting your account back, contacting them is BORDERLINE IMPOSSIBLE. All this information was backed up by research. I've been on Scratch for 2 years, and was falsely banned, not once, not twice, but FOUR times! And I hate it.
Answer: Yup! You can make anything on scratch. Just make sure it is okay for younger children to see.
Scratch has a rating of 1.8 stars from 93 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with Scratch most frequently mention new account, year olds and ban people. Scratch ranks 153rd among Kids Educational Resources sites.