https://www.scratchfoundation.org/membership

There's a new Scratch membership to support the Scratch Foundation.

This includes exclusive sprites for your projects, however, because of the way Scratch is, these aren't really exclusive, and can just be taken from a project…

Will there be any protections for these sprites?

probably not

I dont think so, because of ToU 4.3:

Scratch ToU wrote:

4.3 All user-generated content you submit to Scratch is licensed to and through Scratch under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This allows others to view and remix your content. This license also allows the Scratch Team to display, distribute, and reproduce your content on the Scratch website, through social media channels, and elsewhere. If you do not want to license your content under this license, then do not share it on Scratch.

qq735 wrote:

https://www.scratchfoundation.org/membership

There's a new Scratch membership to support the Scratch Foundation.

This includes exclusive sprites for your projects, however, because of the way Scratch is, these aren't really exclusive, and can just be taken from a project…

Will there be any protections for these sprites?

It's more like exclusive early access to content.

So, you could technically pull sprites via a backpack, but you'd have to go hunting for projects that have them in order to backpack them. And then you'd have to go hunting through your backpack. Members don't have to go through all of that.

Welp, scratch is going through a dark paid future I guess…

WigglyJoey wrote:

Welp, scratch is going through a dark paid future I guess…

Hopefully this money is used to actually make the site better and not blown on other stuff like events. This is why I'm so skeptical of the new membership plan.

RoboNinja4067 wrote:

WigglyJoey wrote:

Welp, scratch is going through a dark paid future I guess…

Hopefully this money is used to actually make the site better and not blown on other stuff like events. This is why I'm so skeptical of the new membership plan.

Yeah, at least it doesn't lock most benefitable features under money.

RoboNinja4067 wrote:

WigglyJoey wrote:

Welp, scratch is going through a dark paid future I guess…

Hopefully this money is used to actually make the site better and not blown on other stuff like events. This is why I'm so skeptical of the new membership plan.

One of the known pitfalls of having things run on donation money is that it's dependent on how much and when those donations come in. Most donate one time, few do recurring donations and these have a tendency to be kind of small. A lot of our large recurring donations come from larger organizations, and sometimes these might not come in at a consistent time due to factors at their organizations, and we do have to acknowledge the possibility they could also stop donating (or, in the case of some services, start charging instead of offering the service as a donation). This kind of makes it hard to plan things like fixes or features (or, in the case of services, it could be disruptive). Which isn't great.

Hence why we now have this membership. You might notice it's slightly higher than the typical donation tier.

Is it kinda strange to take this route to make donating a higher amount more incentive in order to plan things ahead? Yeah, we acknowledge that. But we're also getting pretty large, and it's not unusual to also see other large nonprofit organizations that run on donation money (e.g. PBS) to have a membership options where everything isn't locked behind a paywall, it's just that members get some earlier/easier access to stuff.

So, no, we're not blowing all this money on events.

(On the opposite end is to be insistent that you guys do not blow the current donation money on things that would stress out the website servers or ST services thin. So uh, you know, don't break the community guidelines, don't misuse the website as a chatting space, don't spam, don't feed the trolls, don't flamepost, etcetera etcetera).