Questions about community guidelines

chromeworks

I seem to keep running afoul of community guidelines in my attempts to draw attention to my tutorials and projects, and I'm if wondering anyone can provide clarification on where I'm going wrong.

Outside links: The guidelines prohibit linking to outside sites with unmoderated chat, but I've been chastised for linking to my personal website, which hosts no chat or discussion forums. I've also been chided for posting links to YouTube tutorials which are marked as children's content and for which chat functionality has been disabled.

Personal Information: The guidelines state that I shouldn't give or solicit real last names, phone numbers, addresses or email addresses. It's a sensible policy, but it seems as though moderators are interpreting this to mean that ANY personal question is forbidden. I recently messaged a student to ask his age and what general part of the world he lived in, and received yet another community guidelines warning.

For context, I'm a elementary school technology teacher, and occasionally showcase student Scratch projects on my YouTube vodcast. I don't think I'm breaching anyone's safety or privacy by saying this project was made by Kevin, Age 11, from Ohio. I'm not looking to break any rules here, but it seems like the de facto rules are much more rigid than stated in the official policy.

Thanks

awesome-llama

chromeworks wrote:
I've been chastised for linking to my personal website, which hosts no chat or discussion forums. I've also been chided for posting links to YouTube tutorials which are marked as children's content and for which chat functionality has been disabled.

Do you actually know why you received that kind of response? I'm not sure who informed you of this because it could go in two ways: It was just random Scratch users who don't understand the rules and commented it to you (but the content is allowed), or that you were told not to by the Scratch Team (via alerts/edited messages that contain the details).
It is fine to link the websites and YouTube videos as you described, because they should be entirely appropriate for Scratch. If it was the Scratch Team that actually said it wasn't allowed, then there is the possibility that it was a mistake when reviewing the report, or you missed a key detail in why it was not allowed. You can always use contact us to ask for elaboration on why there was an issue.

chromeworks wrote:
The guidelines state that I shouldn't give or solicit real last names, phone numbers, addresses or email addresses. It's a sensible policy, but it seems as though moderators are interpreting this to mean that ANY personal question is forbidden. I recently messaged a student to ask his age and what general part of the world he lived in, and received yet another community guidelines warning.

Privacy is a bit tricky with Scratch, and I find there are all sorts of intracacies with what is or isn't allowed.

With details like first names and ages, they are fine. Especially with ages, you can see a huge amount of users who post their ages on the site in places like their profile, or even mentioning it in comments or forum topics. There's not going to be an issue here unless the information is more specific, like a full date of birth.

In the case you provided, I cannot see a reason why it isn't allowed and I find it odd that you received the warning for it too. My only suggestion for this is that you make it clear in the comments why you are asking (if not done so already).

GachaN0nsense

chromeworks wrote:
Personal Information: I recently messaged a student to ask his age and what general part of the world he lived in, and received yet another community guidelines warning.

Were they your student? If not, you may have received a warning for trying to get someone's age. This normally is seen stalk-ish. People do, however, release their age if it feels comfortable for them.

chromeworks wrote:
Outside links: I've been chastised for linking to my personal website, which hosts no chat or discussion forums. I've also been chided for posting links to YouTube tutorials which are marked as children's content and for which chat functionality has been disabled.

Scratch has a list of white-listed sites for you to link to. While YouTube is one of these sites, they might have found something that isn't made for kids on them, so you might want to look through your channel for them, unless they are all tutorials marked for kids, I don't seem to see anything wrong here. Oh, and if someone not a Scratch Team member did that and the ST did not send u a warning message, you should be fine then.

edit: Hmmm did I get ninja'd?

Last edited by GachaN0nsense (Dec. 2, 2020 13:20:22)

MOVING TO @NotDucki_

chromeworks

Thanks for your thoughtful replies, @GachaN0nsense and @awesome-llama.

To clarify, these were all official warnings from Scratch mods, leading to my account being temporarily suspended yesterday over repeated violations of community guidelines.

I'm finding this very frustrating, I keep adjusting my communications strategy based on feedback from mods, but everything I try just results in a new warning.

To clarify, my YouTube channel hosts a mix of content marked for children and general content, but I don't think I've linked to anything not marked for kids. In any event, I stopped trying to post YouTube links and shifted to linking to my website, but the warnings persist, and now I'm on MIT's naughty list.

I've reached out to mods via Contact Us, but am not expecting a speedy reply.

Thanks again

scratchmaster295

chromeworks wrote:
For context, I'm a elementary school technology teacher, and occasionally showcase student Scratch projects on my YouTube vodcast. I don't think I'm breaching anyone's safety or privacy by saying this project was made by Kevin, Age 11, from Ohio. I'm not looking to break any rules here, but it seems like the de facto rules are much more rigid than stated in the official policy.
Thanks

Although there are probably numerous 11 year old kevins in Ohio, I'm quite sure giving out names is not allowed.

-Scratchmaster295
She/They

mtech22

chromeworks wrote:
Thanks for your thoughtful replies, @GachaN0nsense and @awesome-llama.

To clarify, these were all official warnings from Scratch mods, leading to my account being temporarily suspended yesterday over repeated violations of community guidelines.

If your account was banned, I advise you to log out of this account, as it is ban evading.

Does your channel have livestreams, or not child friendly content? Even if you don't link that content, simply linking your youtube channel is violating the rules.

As for personal information, the more personal information you give, the more dangerous it is. Most people on scratch will understandably, not share their exact location like state or province. That is personal information, because a kid might not know what you will do with their information.

If they're your student, I would ask them via email or some other form of communications. If they're not, I think you should stay to your own students instead. If I received a comment like that, (No offense) I would report it.

scratchmaster295 wrote:
Although there are probably numerous 11 year old kevins in Ohio, I'm quite sure giving out names is not allowed.

As long as it is a first name, it is fine.

If you do have a question about something a moderator did, contact us is the best thing to use:
https://scratch.mit.edu/contact-us/

Last edited by mtech22 (Dec. 2, 2020 15:04:47)

aII toasters toast toast, but what happens when there are no longer toasters being produced? will their technology simply become obsolete, with humans moving onto bigger, better things? will toast become a distant memory, written in textbooks of the future as foods us simpler generations ate? who's to say! society is constantly moving, changing, evolving, ideas being built upon, improved upon, theories being proven or disproven. are we but a blip on the timeline? sure, our names may not be remembered, but that's not the point. you can make a change. you can make a difference. you can make the world better, even if you don't know yet. and the first step is to go for it. even if you are afraid of failure. going back to the example of toasters, do you know off the top of your head who invented them? no? have you used one? probably. so, even if you don't remember my name, if I was able to help awnser your question, that is enough. if I was able to help you, even in the slightest way, this could push you to continue with scratch and not give up after the program crashes, and maybe one day learn other programming languages and change the world. everything is a cause and effect reaction, new inventions lead to the technology of the future, and even as the generations of the past are slowly forgotten, their influence lives on to this day, affecting how the world eventually turned out and how it will be for generations to come.

and, without toasters, we wouldn't have toast.

10goto10

What’s allowed in a website is listed in this post: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/4421/

This might not be the case because I have not seen your personal website but giving out any sort of contact information is not allowed.

And I would don’t be surprised if chromeworks was considered a commercial enterprise since you are asking for support via Patreon. If so then this is also something that the Scratch team would block.

You are probably wise to not expect a speedy reply from the Scratch team.

Maybe if you made a ‘clean room’ channel with no contact email, no contact information of any kind, no link to any sort of payment/donation method, no live stream, and,well,actually, no links to Anything and no mention of your main site. Maybe call it something like ‘Best of Chromeworks’ and if anyone is interested they can decide to take the initiative and do a search on chromeworks and maybe find you that way.

Hopefully you will get an actual answer from the Scratch Team.

Do you have an Animate a Name project that you'd like to have added to a studio? Please leave a comment

in this studio.

GachaN0nsense

chromeworks wrote:
shifted to linking to my website

There is a list of sites that you can and cannot link. Sadly, your site is possibly not one of them.

MOVING TO @NotDucki_

10goto10

GachaN0nsense wrote:
chromeworks wrote:
shifted to linking to my website

There is a list of sites that you can and cannot link. Sadly, your site is possibly not one of them.

That apparently changed back on June 12, 2020.

Paddle2see wrote:
Hi Folks! You no longer need to register your personal websites here prior to linking to them from Scratch. Please be sure ..

This is from his topic https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/4421/

Do you have an Animate a Name project that you'd like to have added to a studio? Please leave a comment

in this studio.

GachaN0nsense

10goto10 wrote:
That apparently changed back on June 12, 2020.

Paddle2see wrote:
Hi Folks! You no longer need to register your personal websites here prior to linking to them from Scratch. Please be sure ..

This is from his topic https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/4421/

Well.. then I guess we have to talk about the YouTube channel and the site itself.

Is your site moderated with moderated chat? If not then you can get warned for it. Do you have a “sign up” place where you enter in your email to sign up? If so, you can get warned for it, which I feel is a bit odd because every site has that. Try making a separate channel for this “general” stuff so that you can safely link your channel without getting warns.

MOVING TO @NotDucki_

chromeworks

Thanks for all the replies, everyone. Some excellent advice and a few things I can try moving forward. As advised, I should probably not comment here any further for now.

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