Community Blocks (secret feature)

DeleteThisAcount

basically there's this team of people who have tested a weird scratch feature called community blocks for some weird mit research.
and theres little proof of it existing.

links:

pdf about community blocks

this could be the same pdf

community blocks image gallery?

list of people working on the project

demo gif

interview page (apparently getting deleted soon)

scratcher reqruitment github page

please inform me of what you can find

this seems to be a project for someones phd or something

Last edited by DeleteThisAcount (June 24, 2018 07:39:16)

LuckyLucky7

How do you access this feature?

Hardmath123

I remember this being demoed at the Scratch Conference a few years back! It was pretty cool. I tried to render a big social network graph of all my Scratch friends…

…but yeah, nothing insidious here, just another ST experiment.

djdolphin

I got a login key at Scratch Day 2016 (they also demoed it there), and shortly after some people in these forums figured out how sign up without an invite. In the process of patching that up they accidentally(?) closed the site for everyone, and now it appears to no longer exist.

DeleteThisAcount

djdolphin wrote:
I got a login key at Scratch Day 2016 (they also demoed it there), and shortly after some people in these forums figured out how sign up without an invite. In the process of patching that up they accidentally(?) closed the site for everyone, and now it appears to no longer exist.

aww man it would of been awesome!!

(bump)

Flowermanvista

Since you said that the Community Blocks interview page is being deleted, I threw it in the Wayback Machine, you can access it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180729175321/https://scratch.mit.edu/info/communityblocks-interviews

DeleteThisAcount

Flowermanvista wrote:
Since you said that the Community Blocks interview page is being deleted, I threw it in the Wayback Machine, you can access it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180729175321/https://scratch.mit.edu/info/communityblocks-interviews

+1 thanks

--_Nova_--

LuckyLucky7 wrote:
How do you access this feature?

It seems like we can't - I'll Inspect Element and surf the web to see what I can do though.

djdolphin wrote:
I got a login key at Scratch Day 2016 (they also demoed it there), and shortly after some people in these forums figured out how sign up without an invite. In the process of patching that up they accidentally(?) closed the site for everyone, and now it appears to no longer exist.

Ah, tough luck…

--_Nova_--

I inspected the editor and found lots of interesting things (including the original transparent icons I may or may not “steal” for some later projects and a way to get high res images via a hidden image gallery) but I couldn't get to the block palettes and icons with my limited Java knowledge so I'm not sure about community blocks… If anyone knows Java well we might have a shot at IE.

red_king_cyclops

Why were these community blocks never made?

--_Nova_--

red_king_cyclops wrote:
Why were these community blocks never made?

I'm not sure - it does seem more personal than other blocks though.

coolgem923

I got an invite for my coolgem923_test account some time back to their test site for this. They were pretty neat, I did a couple things with it.
The site was data-blocks.scratch.ly. It's no longer online, unfortunately, and I don't believe I have any screenshots, I can only say from memory. While it was online, there was also a board for it on the discussion forums, and the site itself was very much like the main Scratch site, just a little more empty (it was a fresh database, no data was imported from the main site).

It was locked down to just the people who received the invite, and the login page was archived.

You could use the blocks to get people's followers, projects, stats, you know the drill. Basically getting information from the Scratch API, but within Scratch. While it was interesting, I doubt they thought it was really useful enough to add to the main site in the long run.

But who knows? Scratch 3 is around the corner, anything could happen.

red_king_cyclops

coolgem923 wrote:
I got an invite for my coolgem923_test account some time back to their test site for this. They were pretty neat, I did a couple things with it.
The site was data-blocks.scratch.ly. It's no longer online, unfortunately, and I don't believe I have any screenshots, I can only say from memory. While it was online, there was also a board for it on the discussion forums, and the site itself was very much like the main Scratch site, just a little more empty (it was a fresh database, no data was imported from the main site).

It was locked down to just the people who received the invite, and the login page was archived.

You could use the blocks to get people's followers, projects, stats, you know the drill. Basically getting information from the Scratch API, but within Scratch. While it was interesting, I doubt they thought it was really useful enough to add to the main site in the long run.

But who knows? Scratch 3 is around the corner, anything could happen.

I think the Scratch Team should add the community blocks to Scratch 3.0 as an extension.

Last edited by red_king_cyclops (July 31, 2018 20:45:23)

--_Nova_--

red_king_cyclops wrote:
coolgem923 wrote:
I got an invite for my coolgem923_test account some time back to their test site for this. They were pretty neat, I did a couple things with it.
The site was data-blocks.scratch.ly. It's no longer online, unfortunately, and I don't believe I have any screenshots, I can only say from memory. While it was online, there was also a board for it on the discussion forums, and the site itself was very much like the main Scratch site, just a little more empty (it was a fresh database, no data was imported from the main site).

It was locked down to just the people who received the invite, and the login page was archived.

You could use the blocks to get people's followers, projects, stats, you know the drill. Basically getting information from the Scratch API, but within Scratch. While it was interesting, I doubt they thought it was really useful enough to add to the main site in the long run.

But who knows? Scratch 3 is around the corner, anything could happen.

I think the Scratch Team should add the community blocks to Scratch 3.0 as an extension.

+1

red_king_cyclops

--_Nova_-- wrote:
red_king_cyclops wrote:
coolgem923 wrote:
I got an invite for my coolgem923_test account some time back to their test site for this. They were pretty neat, I did a couple things with it.
The site was data-blocks.scratch.ly. It's no longer online, unfortunately, and I don't believe I have any screenshots, I can only say from memory. While it was online, there was also a board for it on the discussion forums, and the site itself was very much like the main Scratch site, just a little more empty (it was a fresh database, no data was imported from the main site).

It was locked down to just the people who received the invite, and the login page was archived.

You could use the blocks to get people's followers, projects, stats, you know the drill. Basically getting information from the Scratch API, but within Scratch. While it was interesting, I doubt they thought it was really useful enough to add to the main site in the long run.

But who knows? Scratch 3 is around the corner, anything could happen.

I think the Scratch Team should add the community blocks to Scratch 3.0 as an extension.
+1

Thank you for your support.

I will suggest the above suggestion in the suggestion forum.

-ShadowOfTheFuture-

The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.

red_king_cyclops

-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.

What is the Community Blocks forum like?

DeleteThisAcount

-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.

whats the forum id?

-ShadowOfTheFuture-

red_king_cyclops wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.
What is the Community Blocks forum like?

DeleteThisAcount wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.
whats the forum id?

Forum ID is 51 I believe

Some screenshots:

ScratchDiogoh

-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
red_king_cyclops wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.
What is the Community Blocks forum like?
DeleteThisAcount wrote:
-ShadowOfTheFuture- wrote:
The funny thing is, on my old account I can still access the Community Blocks forum.
whats the forum id?

Forum ID is 51 I believe

Some screenshots:

for me it gives me a 403 not scratch

Discuss Scratch