phone number censor and links

miniepicness

is this fixed yet

Black_Rock_Pride

I am not the expert. I have no idea. i will go into a corner now.

Flowermanvista

Please make sure your posts are constructive. If you don't know the answer to an online question, it's better to just not answer than to answer “i don't know” and cluttering up the topic.

zhuoranma2006

Folowed, this is such a serious problem.

-GirlMcGirl3-

Aronix wrote:
Why would you ever need to link someone a Phone Number? And if you really did, do it somewhere else; like Facebook, or Google Hangouts.

yeah exactly

coder2045

jromagnoli wrote:
miniepicness wrote:
Eventually, when we get to the next digit in the project codes, the phone number censor will replace all link project codes with XXXXXXXXXX, and people will not be able to tell eachother about their projects, or link their new project on their profile, you may need to fix this.
Wow… I didn't really think about this, because I didn't know we were so close. That's going to be a big problem.

We're 41% of the way there and getting ~100M/year, so we should run into this sometime around 2025-6.

coder2045

miniepicness wrote:
CellularData wrote:
The easiest way to fix this would be to exempt the phone number filter in Scratch URLs.

Except for one HUGE problem…

Let's say your number is 314-159-2653 (This is pi, and actually not even a real phone number so don't get mad at me). You could give out your number by linking to this project:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/3141592653/

All you'd have to do is say something like “the number in the URL is my number” and people would get what you meant.

Another fix could be to skip 10 letter URLs and jump to 11 letters, but this presents another problem:
PHONE NUMBERS IN NON-USA COUNTRIES

This is a way bigger problem than it seems…
yeah. maybe skip to 20 characters? but that would take SO MUCH SPACE

"My phone number is the numbers in scratch.mit.edu/projects/55531428280000000000/ but without the 0s.
(Phone numbers starting with 555 are reserved for fictional purposes.)

yash666

Me

if <I wake up> then
set [Me v] to [friendly]
end
forever
loves karate
end

Last edited by yash666 (Jan. 3, 2021 20:44:17)

NullingTheVoid

Wow. This is pretty serious. Definitely an important topic

Flowermanvista

Bumping this because there still doesn't seem to be a solution to this.

When this topic was posted, there were about 140,000,000 total projects on the site, and that was about 10 years into Scratch's history. Since then, we've gotten to over 500,000,000 in only 3 and a quarter years, and seemingly, Scratch is continuing to grow.

Should current trends continue*, I predict we may hit that 1,000,000,000 mark in as little as 2 and a half years as of writing this post. Feel free to quote me on this if this prediction fails to pan out.

Something has to be done before then, whether it be making a new project URL scheme, removing the phone number filter, or doing something else.

*WARNING: Opinions incoming! Of course, it's very possible that those trends won't continue. The way I see it, the current trends of “mass reporting” (when someone says that, they're usually talking about their project being unshared by the automatic censor), the ST seemingly doing nothing about reported content, and Contact Us messages taking weeks or months to get responses are all symptoms of the same problem - that being that there are too many users for the number of moderators, which could potentially lead to stagnation or even people leaving if it gets bad enough.

Flowermanvista

bump

BarelySmooth

Agreed. Something has to be done about this. But what options do we have?

Do nothing about this?
Develop a new system for storing projects? Example: scratch.mit.edu/username/1,2,3, etc?
Use letters? Example: scratch.mit.edu/projects/Ab826Hn2l…?
Use another base? like hexadecimals? Example: scratch.mit.edu/projects/0x1C756155
Allow phone numbers?

I have pretty much no idea about how phone numbers work in the US, so my suggestions might not be that perfect!

Flowermanvista wrote:
…the ST seemingly doing nothing about reported content, and Contact Us messages taking weeks or months to get responses are all symptoms of the same problem - that being that there are too many users for the number of moderators, which could potentially lead to stagnation or even people leaving if it gets bad enough.

Maybe increase the number of moderators? Many more people have joined scratch since March 2020. Have a look at the statistics page! I have not tried Contact Us and so, I am unsure of how long it takes. I would not blame the Scratch Team for this give the number of users Scratch has.

Last edited by BarelySmooth (March 17, 2021 15:14:10)

46009361

The bug is fixed for links, but it still sometimes censors things like Pi because they look like a phone number.

Obviously, people can still bypass the phone number filter. Something like finding letters to substitute for numbers (e.g. Crayola's call/text number is at +1 (800) CRA-YOLA) or something like “plus one four eight zero five five five one two three four”; 555 is fictional and reserved by Hollywood).

Last edited by 46009361 (April 17, 2021 15:56:10)

MFA101

My Project: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/543108682

Owner can't reverse 1 digit
It's wrong!
It's says: 7.1407666666…666
Will be reverse:
6.666666661407

But it's censor will be: X.XXXXXXXXXXXX
This it's so unfair but Thanks Scratch!

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