Rig-inator wrote:

my friend tried to sign into his scratch account and it said: “we have no existing accounts with this name”

cactus-cacti wrote:

Rig-inator wrote:

my friend tried to sign into his scratch account and it said: “we have no existing accounts with this name”

Did he delete it?

FreezeNova wrote:

M1mikyu wrote:

So I remember when I was younger and people really liked those “namesnipe” accounts, I had wanted to make one. I noticed that “lol” didn’t exist, so I decided to make my own account called lol. So, I went onto account creation and did the username “lol” but it said “this account already exists!”. (Or whatever they say, it’s something along those lines)
I was confused by this, as there was no person with the username “lol”. It turns out that an account with that username DOES exist, but it was deleted. Because usernames that don’t exist yet and accounts that are deleted all show the same “whoops our server is scratch’ing its head” message, it can cause some confusion on whether there never was an account with that username or if there was one but it was deleted.

Here’s a link in case you want to understand more https://scratch.mit.edu/users/lol/
(I remembered it as being OMG I wanted to make a username of, but I checked and that account seems to still exist. Huh.)
SO! Here’s my suggestion.

Rather than just saying the standard “our server is scratch’ing it’s head”, it would have an additional thing saying “this account has been deleted”.
And, with usernames that have never been made into accounts yet, it could say “this username/account doesn’t exist!“. Perhaps there could also be a “did you mean….” thing, where it shows similar usernames which are real just in case it was a typo.

For instance, someone tried to view the profile of someone named “cat”, but they wrote “cats” instead and that account didn’t exist. The message will say “is it possible that you meant @cat, @cats1, @catss?” which helps them find the user they were looking for, which was cat.


This could help with some confusion. Let me know if you have any questions.


This adds some more explanation as per why this would be a good idea.

BearSlothCoding wrote:

To everyone saying that showing an account was deleted would be bad in the case that the user doesn't want people to know that their account was deleted: The account was deleted. It now shows a 404 page instead of their profile. And if that person knows they aren't misspelling the username, they now know for sure that their account was deleted. You can't hide that. The page wouldn't say why it got deleted, just that it did somehow. If you went to the sign-up page and entered that username or added a “/followers” at the end of the URL, you would know that the account got deleted. This really just saves those extra steps.

The same user has made these mock ups:

sorry. No support. If there was a very inappropriate username, It's better if it seemed like it never existed rather than deleted..