I've seen quite a lot of posts about the same recent and relevant issues with thumbnails. It looks like these issues have been widespread according to several forum threads about this very issue.

If you are noticing these issues too, it would be great to sort out the conversation in one place. It's hard to find another place to discuss these issues on, so feel free to talk about it on this thread.


A lot of people are talking about thumbnails “becoming” Scratch Cat instead of the thumbnail they wanted.

According to @cheddargirl, the Scratch Team was/is working on some website updates (possibly maintenance, upgrades, and more). Combined with site activity, the thumbnails and PFPs might not work as expected. Plus, the ST, being not-for-profit, won't have as much resources as other sites to work on the less essential things, including double-checking thumbnails to try and fix those.

My current guess as to why this problem happens is that just like the ST said, they're doing some work on the server side of things, causing thumbnails to sometimes behave weird. If thumbnail requests are not being handled properly, then they become replaced with something that will work, and that working thing is the placeholder image (in the case of projects, a picture of the Scratch Cat). They also take some time to refresh, which is why saving your project again or trying to upload a new picture won't work. The reason this problem happens more is because they're doing a lot of work to support their growing service and (potentially still) moving servers.

Or requests that handle thumbnail delivery are timing out. More traffic at certain times of the day obviously creates more requests to load content for the servers, and when stuff is taking too long, the servers can't keep up and some requests are dropped. If they happen to stop a thumbnail from loading, then they are put in a state where they stay a placeholder, which you see as a default thumbnail.

I'm not an expert on servers or content delivery but based on how the thumbnails are behaving right now, this is what I'm thinking. But if these issues come up at high-traffic times only, then it could very well be why the problem is happening and prove the timing-out theory.


There are also several Scratchers that found that images wouldn't update right away. Often, this is due to caching or delays in content delivery. This is true on many other sites. I've seen this recently when updating my profile picture took about 5 minutes to be reflected everywhere. So, don't worry if your profile picture or project/studio thumbnail hasn't changed right away, it might be taking some time to finish processing.


Don't worry about whether all of your thumbnails are saved, because they are somewhere on the server if you did set them already, just not being shown due to glitches. The thumbnails do eventually get restored.


Some of you may be asking to know, what can I do while there are problems with thumbnails? Well, the more traffic there is, the more time it will take the site to do stuff, so one of the things you could do is just take a break and make projects on the Scratch app. This means you don't have to think about thumbnails at all, as you're not on the Scratch website, and projects will save to your device. You can download projects you want to continue working on, or create new ones from the app.


If you want to see a working version of an affected thumbnail, you can adjust the “_number x number” part of the image URL, which you can get by right-clicking it, and selecting “copy image address” or “copy image link”. While this doesn't fix the thumbnail that is already affected, the resized version will have a chance to load properly, since how images work is they have to be reprocessed every time you resize them.


So hopefully this post will catch some people's attention, give them some helpful info, and continue sorting out the thumbnail/PFP conversations. This will likely continue being a problem for a while, but the ST have been upgrading servers recently, and certain site activity have hit an all-time high in the most recent years (see the Statistics page). On the other side, hopefully updates will help thumbnails be a little more stable.

Other threads: GerekRulesGwof's list of server work effects / Chiroyce's thread for thumbnail issues

Finally, someone made a topic like that!

(1000 Posts. (✔::operators)(❌::variables)(❌)(❌)(❌) 5000 Posts! 

Congrats on being sticked!

White_Lord wrote:

Congrats on being sticked!

Hooray!

5th! Hopefully this will clear up some of the confusion!

there was also a wave of thumb and pfp problems in june

7th. also, THANk you for making this.

8th. This will hopefully help a lot.

Edit: YES! I think I found the reason the bug exists!

sudo sh -c 'echo "text" > file'

echo 'text' | sudo tee file 1> /dev/null

Thanks for making this topic!

Hopefully, it'll clear up a lot of confusion.

10th post. Nice.

People never pay attention to stickies
I've seen 5+ topics about this just today

I agree. When I get a reply from someone in my mail box, the Profile picture is shown, but when I reply to that person, The PFP disappears

when I receive [Glitches with Profile pictures v]
say [Me: Pease fix this Glitch Scratch Team. Do not ignore this :(]

sit_candy wrote:

I agree. When I get a reply from someone in my mail box, the Profile picture is shown, but when I reply to that person, The PFP disappears

when I receive [Glitches with Profile pictures v]
say [Me: Please fix this Glitch Scratch Team. Do not ignore this :(]

I hope they fix it

sit_candy wrote:

I agree. When I get a reply from someone in my mail box, the Profile picture is shown, but when I reply to that person, The PFP disappears

when I receive [Glitches with Profile pictures v]
say [Me: Pease fix this Glitch Scratch Team. Do not ignore this :(]

Same

I've been noticing the scratch cat thumbnails when it should NOT be. For example, mainly if you go to remixed projects, as well as other projects with a lower view count than what you see on the main page.

This has NOT been an issue until just recently (couple days?). So something MUST have happened!

Yes its happening with thumbnails and pfp's trying to fix it not working somone help?

when I receive [Glitches with profile pics and thumbnails v]
say [Me: Please fix this glitch]

NMario84 wrote:

I've been noticing the scratch cat thumbnails when it should NOT be. For example, mainly if you go to remixed projects, as well as other projects with a lower view count than what you see on the main page.

This has NOT been an issue until just recently (couple days?). So something MUST have happened!

Yes i agree theres somthing going on

Nice! Congrats on the sticky c:

i will predict king of 2nd page
edit: nvm no king for me

FYI: We're doing some website updates right now. If you're trying to update a thumbnail or PFP right now, you might want to wait a few days and do a cache refresh.

cheddargirl wrote:

FYI: We're doing some website updates right now. If you're trying to update a thumbnail or PFP right now, you might want to wait a few days and do a cache refresh.

Thank you - very helpful to quote.