alexandretherrien wrote:

wer65hertg wrote:

alexandretherrien wrote:

This document explains exactly why these hacks are a thing. Here’s the important part:

document

-snip-

Where did you get that document?

I forgot to add the link. It’s a document from the scratch team. Here’s the link

Oh my god that's an old one, I can tell because it has the Google search feature, which was removed nearly 7 years ago in the same year as that document (as well as the explore page). And it has the old explore page (which had the tag search feature), as well as the help page in the navbar.
Also, bringing this up.

Yeah, this really should be fixed.

Honestly I believe they should do this if they can:

It should work like somewhat like the old tag system.

1. There might be a tag limit, like Scratch 2.0 had. It would most likely have an increased limit however.
2. You would only be able to have at most one of a tag. (obvious)
3. They would be separate from the title, notes and credits, or the instructions. (obvious)
4. If the tags did not relate to the project, then that would be reportable. (obvious)
5. There could be a way to select built in tags and/or your own tags, like in Scratch 1.x. So if your project was a 0S game, you could have the tags “games” selected since it's the built in one, then add the tags “0S”, “0 sprites”, “zero sprites”, or stuff like that.

Or:

There would have to be pre-select categories to choose from. (though it might be hard to categorize if this was the case).

And here's what it looked like in 1.x:


In 2.0:

Yeah, they should just add back the 2.0 tag system. I'm honestly not sure why they changed it, as I can't remember ANYBODY misusing the tags back then. The 1.0 system got changed because people could add tags to someone else's projects and it got spammy (at least according to the Wiki) but the only reason I could think of that they changed the 2.0 system is that three tags wasn't enough. Well, just limit it to something like 5 or 10 tags and don't let any of them be duplicates. Boom. Problem SOLVED!

Unfortunately still not fixed. I find it a bit weird that the Scratch Team repeatedly features projects that uses these exploits.

Hopefully they are planning to fix this at one point.

Fun_Cupcake_i81 wrote:

Yeah, they should just add back the 2.0 tag system. I'm honestly not sure why they changed it, as I can't remember ANYBODY misusing the tags back then. The 1.0 system got changed because people could add tags to someone else's projects and it got spammy (at least according to the Wiki) but the only reason I could think of that they changed the 2.0 system is that three tags wasn't enough. Well, just limit it to something like 5 or 10 tags and don't let any of them be duplicates. Boom. Problem SOLVED!

Agreed, I liked the 2.0 system much better. It is super annoying seeing projects that get popular, regardless of whether it's a “good” project or not, where it's obvious that the number of views is because the user has spammed tags in the description.

Hopefully the fix you suggested would be fairly easy on the development end too because it was already an existing feature.

Tris_das_Einhorn wrote:

Fun_Cupcake_i81 wrote:

Yeah, they should just add back the 2.0 tag system. I'm honestly not sure why they changed it, as I can't remember ANYBODY misusing the tags back then. The 1.0 system got changed because people could add tags to someone else's projects and it got spammy (at least according to the Wiki) but the only reason I could think of that they changed the 2.0 system is that three tags wasn't enough. Well, just limit it to something like 5 or 10 tags and don't let any of them be duplicates. Boom. Problem SOLVED!

Agreed, I liked the 2.0 system much better. It is super annoying seeing projects that get popular, regardless of whether it's a “good” project or not, where it's obvious that the number of views is because the user has spammed tags in the description.

Hopefully the fix you suggested would be fairly easy on the development end too because it was already an existing feature.

I Miss specially how the old explore page kept everything organized and clean. In the new explore page, it is really buggy and just a real pain (for me at least) to navigate around projects.

wait so is it ethical for me or not to use this, seeing as everyone else is doing it? (i have not done this)

-NuclearCode- wrote:

wait so is it ethical for me or not to use this, seeing as everyone else is doing it? (i have not done this)

I would say that even though everyone else is doing it, it is probably not a good idea to do it.

Fun_Cupcake_i81 wrote:

Yeah, they should just add back the 2.0 tag system. I'm honestly not sure why they changed it, as I can't remember ANYBODY misusing the tags back then. The 1.0 system got changed because people could add tags to someone else's projects and it got spammy (at least according to the Wiki) but the only reason I could think of that they changed the 2.0 system is that three tags wasn't enough. Well, just limit it to something like 5 or 10 tags and don't let any of them be duplicates. Boom. Problem SOLVED!

I agree with this idea, because I feel like it should be simple to do.

Also, should the system be recognizing the number of times a phrase appears? Shouldn't it just recognize if it is or isn't there? It's a little odd.

how about a bump?

ive seen quite a few projects using that technique. didnt know what it was for.

Bumping this…

Minecraft_Master3964 wrote:

Also, should the system be recognizing the number of times a phrase appears? Shouldn't it just recognize if it is or isn't there? It's a little odd.

It is strange, the OP found a document with the Scratch Team's reasoning -

alexandretherrien wrote:

This document by the Scratch Team explains exactly why these hacks are a thing. Here’s the important part:

Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TF/IDF) at index time assigns weights to each
term in a document. The weight of a term is computed using 3 factors: term frequency, inverse
document frequency, and field­length norm. The term frequency assigns a higher weight to a
term that appears more often in a document, since the term probably plays an important role in
the document, if it appears often. For example, if the word “cat” appears 10 times in a document,
the document probably is about cats, but if it only appears once in a document, then cats is
probably not an important word in the document. Inverse document frequency counts how often
a term appears in all documents in the collection and assigns a higher weight to terms that appear
less often in all documents. A term such as “the” gets a low score from inverse document
frequency, since “the” is a common term that appears in most documents. The last factor
field­length norm assigns higher weights to terms that appear in a short field. That means if a
word appears in a short title, it receives a higher score, than if the same term appears in a long
body field. This makes sense, since terms in a short title are probably more relevant to the
document. The title of this document is “Design and Implementation of Search for the Scratch
Online Community”. If someone were to search for the word “Search”, odds are this document is
more relevant than a different document that contains the word “search” once in the sentence “I
search for her” in the long body of the document (page 37)

It says that when searching something, the results are based on how many time the searched word is used in the description and on how long is the title and the description.

So here what’s probably happening: The search feature and the explore tabs are sharing the same method to order projects. So clicking on the animations tab is the equivalent of searching ‘’animations’’ and clicking on trending. So projects on the animations tab are projects where the word ‘’animations’’ appear the most (tag spam), where “animations” is in the title (tag in the title), and where the description and the title is the shortest (having just one tag as a description).

This method works fine for search to show more relevant results, but it does not work well with the explore tabs. The problem is this only works if people do not know how the system work, because, as soon as they know how to exploits it (which the majority already does), they are just going to spam tags which defy the entire purpose of this method. What they should do for the explore tabs is just take the projects that have the tag and order them based on how trending they are. I’m sure the results whould be way better and more fair. How you use tags should not affect where your project is positioned on the explore page.

TL;DR: The search engine prioritizes projects that use your search phrase multiple times, and currently the explore page is just a glorified search page.

I was wondering what was up with that! Thank you so much for telling me!

Bump, as this is still happening.

Is this still a problem?

redspacecat wrote:

Is this still a problem?

I guess so, but the OP has literally made his own explore page now (not to mention the last post was a year and a half ago, please don't necropost) so the issue is a smaller issue. Also…

alexandretherrien wrote:

They fixed the explore freezes

And now it's back? Like, the current explore page has not changed in like 3 weeks….

The_Cool_Scratch_Guy wrote:

redspacecat wrote:

Is this still a problem?

not to mention the last post was a year and a half ago, please don't necropost

I though necroposting didn't apply in this case, because I was asking if this was still relevant. Also the last post was only 8 months ago, not a year and a half.

redspacecat wrote:

The_Cool_Scratch_Guy wrote:

redspacecat wrote:

Is this still a problem?

not to mention the last post was a year and a half ago, please don't necropost

I though necroposting didn't apply in this case, because I was asking if this was still relevant. Also the last post was only 8 months ago, not a year and a half.

Yeah, I thought that necroposting wasn't a thing in bugs and glitches or suggestions, as long as the bug/suggestion is still relevant (not fixed, not implemented, not rejected, etc.)

Also, I reckon this is still a thing, because every trending project still spams tags, but it could just be because popular people do that on instinct.

Note: I do realise this is the bugs and glitches forum, it's just I'm pretty sure the same rule applies in suggestions.

redspacecat wrote:

Is this still a problem?

It seems that it's still a problem. When I clicked on one of the projects with the “Games” tab selected, there was a lot of tag spam.
Anyway, the tag limit should definitely be reintroduced (same with allowing only one of each tag)