Sorry if this is a duplicate suggestion.

I hang out on a studio called the Gaehive: https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/5842709/comments

In the studio, we require trigger warnings for multiple different things such as all-caps messages and sensitive topics such as homophobia. (examples: tw caps /// BURGERS | tw homophobia /// someone was being homophobic towards me at school today) Recently, there has been a troll that was spamming all-caps messages and refusing to add trigger warnings, which, of course, triggered multiple people. This gave someone an idea that this suggestion is based off of.

A built-in trigger warning feature for comments. Basically, it would show a TW for whatever sensitive topic the comment contains, and it would blur the words in the comment. Users could click on the blurred comment to view what it says or shows.

I have two ways this could work:

- Users would be able to TW a comment themselves.
- The TWs are placed by a bot.

This system would be beneficial for people that find some things triggering because some people don't put TWs on their comments or projects and people get triggered. If this were implemented into Scratch, people could go around without having to see things that may trigger them.

Hope this is a good suggestion and not a dupe!

Edit: Saw that project TWs might not be as effective as comment TWs so I deleted the “project” part of this suggestion :>

A warning isn't enough to get rid the problem. Many scratchers overestimate their bravery, and get punished for it with a lot of nightmares. Warnings won't change whether or not a project gets taken down..

The_Blue_J wrote:

A warning isn't enough to get rid the problem. Many scratchers overestimate their bravery, and get punished for it with a lot of nightmares. Warnings won't change whether or not a project gets taken down..

So the TW feature should just be for comments?

I'm not sure what exactly you're proposing. Are you proposing a feature to add spoiler warnings to comments? I support this. However, what I think would be more useful is a feature where each user has a list of keywords, and any comments that contain those keywords are spoilered. That way, you don't have to rely on others to add TWs or spoiler warnings. Having an AI add TWs is too complicated and not feasible.

It seems quite similar to this, however, one completely hides the word while the other only adds a warning

DogCatPuppyLover wrote:

I'm not sure what exactly you're proposing. Are you proposing a feature to add spoiler warnings to comments? I support this. However, what I think would be more useful is a feature where each user has a list of keywords, and any comments that contain those keywords are spoilered. That way, you don't have to rely on others to add TWs or spoiler warnings. Having an AI add TWs is too complicated and not feasible.

Yeah, I did think an AI would be difficult. But my reasoning for that part was because of how, if the ability to trigger/spoiler-warning a comment was given to users, some users (especially trolls) may ignore the feature. However, you're right, it would be very complex for an AI to add TWs.

And yeah, spoiler warnings are what I'm proposing.

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

However, you're right, it would be very complex for an AI to add TWs.

And yeah, spoiler warnings are what I'm proposing.

So if users have to set their own spoiler warnings, how would this solve the problem of a troll accessing the studio to spam triggering content?

Za-Chary wrote:

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

However, you're right, it would be very complex for an AI to add TWs.

And yeah, spoiler warnings are what I'm proposing.

So if users have to set their own spoiler warnings, how would this solve the problem of a troll accessing the studio to spam triggering content?

I don't know how this would work, but maybe if someone were to spam triggering content and not add trigger warnings, they'd get a warning message from ST or something.

Or, maybe ST could make “not adding TWs to potentially triggering messages” a valid reason for reporting a comment and the comment the person made would be deleted and the commenter would be warned.

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

I don't know how this would work, but maybe if someone were to spam triggering content and not add trigger warnings, they'd get a warning message from ST or something.

Or, maybe ST could make “not adding TWs to potentially triggering messages” a valid reason for reporting a comment and the comment the person made would be deleted and the commenter would be warned.

[tw: caps]

The problem with this is that not all triggering content inherently breaks the Community Guidelines. For instance, commenting

I LOVE THIS PROJECT!!!

on someone's game should be seen as encouraging (after all, they like the project). So just reporting the comment wouldn't really solve anything. Recall that currently there are no options presented when reporting a comment — but even if there were, it can be difficult to identify exactly what the triggering content is. (The Scratch Team would at least have to think about what it is, otherwise trolls could report any comment to be “triggering.”)

I guess maybe it depends on where the comment is posted? I'd be fine with getting the above all-caps compliment on my project. So then I'm not sure how feasible it would be to have the Scratch Team only take down triggering content in some places but not others. How would they know which places these sorts of comments are or are not okay? Unless of course they just banned all-caps messages entirely — but I'm not sure how useful or accepted that would be.

Here are some of my thoughts on this. I don't believe scratch has any rules about trigger warnings being required on messages that may trigger people, nor do I think they should. While people can get triggered (rightfully so) it is still sometimes very hard to do. I don't think having a list of words set by the studio to make it not post or automatically give a trigger warning will work, scratch already has its own filter.
However, I do think that maybe having a checkbox next to the post warning will add a trigger warning automatically. You would check the box and then could enter something like “bad-mouthing dogs” and then it could show at the top of the comment.

Za-Chary wrote:

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

However, you're right, it would be very complex for an AI to add TWs.

And yeah, spoiler warnings are what I'm proposing.

So if users have to set their own spoiler warnings, how would this solve the problem of a troll accessing the studio to spam triggering content?

As for what zachary said, I don't think it would solve the problem of a troll. I think the best solution would be to give slightly more permissions to the studio creator/curators/managers that would allow them to have slightly more permissions over the studio, moderation permissions in a sense.

Za-Chary wrote:

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

I don't know how this would work, but maybe if someone were to spam triggering content and not add trigger warnings, they'd get a warning message from ST or something.

Or, maybe ST could make “not adding TWs to potentially triggering messages” a valid reason for reporting a comment and the comment the person made would be deleted and the commenter would be warned.

[tw: caps]

The problem with this is that not all triggering content inherently breaks the Community Guidelines. For instance, commenting

I LOVE THIS PROJECT!!!

on someone's game should be seen as encouraging (after all, they like the project). So just reporting the comment wouldn't really solve anything. Recall that currently there are no options presented when reporting a comment — but even if there were, it can be difficult to identify exactly what the triggering content is. (The Scratch Team would at least have to think about what it is, otherwise trolls could report any comment to be “triggering.”)

I guess maybe it depends on where the comment is posted? I'd be fine with getting the above all-caps compliment on my project. So then I'm not sure how feasible it would be to have the Scratch Team only take down triggering content in some places but not others. How would they know which places these sorts of comments are or are not okay? Unless of course they just banned all-caps messages entirely — but I'm not sure how useful or accepted that would be.

I don't think banning all-caps messages would be very useful and it would not be very accepted across the Scratch community. I know that there's not a list of reasons to report a comment, but I assumed that the Scratch Team has some sort of way to discrete content that should and shouldn't be reported. But now I realized I'm just describing the Community Guidelines.

I think that if someone reports a potentially triggering comment on a project or studio, the Scratch Team should look into the context (Looking into the context should be applied to all reports) They should be asking these questions: What is this project or studio about? Who created it and what is the audience of this project/studio? Is this comment actually concerning? What is the purpose of the comment?

If the Scratch Team deems the comment and the purpose of the comment triggering, I believe they should remove it, but only if the comment doesn't have a spoiler warning on it.

ShluffyMonster wrote:

Here are some of my thoughts on this. I don't believe scratch has any rules about trigger warnings being required on messages that may trigger people, nor do I think they should. While people can get triggered (rightfully so) it is still sometimes very hard to do. I don't think having a list of words set by the studio to make it not post or automatically give a trigger warning will work, scratch already has its own filter.
However, I do think that maybe having a checkbox next to the post warning will add a trigger warning automatically. You would check the box and then could enter something like “bad-mouthing dogs” and then it could show at the top of the comment.

Za-Chary wrote:

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

However, you're right, it would be very complex for an AI to add TWs.

And yeah, spoiler warnings are what I'm proposing.

So if users have to set their own spoiler warnings, how would this solve the problem of a troll accessing the studio to spam triggering content?

As for what zachary said, I don't think it would solve the problem of a troll. I think the best solution would be to give slightly more permissions to the studio creator/curators/managers that would allow them to have slightly more permissions over the studio, moderation permissions in a sense.

I'll reply to this with a full reply in a minute, but I need to catch my bus

No support would be costly and resource-consuming.

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

I don't know how this would work, but maybe if someone were to spam triggering content and not add trigger warnings, they'd get a warning message from ST or something.

Shouldn't triggering content be reported anyways? I don't really see how a warning would resolve any triggerings. I don't really want comments to be littered with trigger warnings either, they are just kind of annoying IMO

alwayspaytaxes wrote:

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

I don't know how this would work, but maybe if someone were to spam triggering content and not add trigger warnings, they'd get a warning message from ST or something.

Shouldn't triggering content be reported anyways? I don't really see how a warning would resolve any triggerings. I don't really want comments to be littered with trigger warnings either, they are just kind of annoying IMO

Not all triggering content breaks the community guidelines, so if you report a bunch of comments that are triggering but don’t break the guidelines, your account could be blocked for “abusing the reporting system.”

This happened to me not too long ago

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

alwayspaytaxes wrote:

MagiPlayz103 wrote:

I don't know how this would work, but maybe if someone were to spam triggering content and not add trigger warnings, they'd get a warning message from ST or something.

Shouldn't triggering content be reported anyways? I don't really see how a warning would resolve any triggerings. I don't really want comments to be littered with trigger warnings either, they are just kind of annoying IMO

Not all triggering content breaks the community guidelines, so if you report a bunch of comments that are triggering but don’t break the guidelines, your account could be blocked for “abusing the reporting system.”

This happened to me not too long ago

And the ones that don’t break the guidelines shouldn’t be blocked unless REALLY severe