I'm making this to regroup ongoing bugs that affect the trending page in hope to reduce confusion among Scratchers who have noticed changes on the trending/explore/search page.


1. The explore page still keep freezing up

The last time it froze was on july 13 and it lasted for 10+ days. But even since, the explore page is still sluggish and keep getting stuck for a few days before updating again



2. Local trendings are gone

Before the last update to the trending algorithm, there was a different trending page for each language that Scratch could be set to. So if you spoke french and you had selected french as your language, you would see the french trending which would only contain french projects. Those projects would therefore be viewed by french people so most of the comments on the french trending page were also french. So, it was really easy for french people to interact with the community and make friends in their native language. I chose french as a example, but the same applies for every other language. But now, the scripts that allowed local trending pages seems to be broken because projects are no longer filtered based on the user's language. So, no matter which language you have selected, scratch do not filter the page to show project in your language. This is probably one of the factors that explains why about 60% of the projects on trending are currently in japanese no matter the selected language.

More detail here: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/622820/



3. Major indexing problems

The content shown on the explore page is irrelevant and misleading because most projects never get indexed fast enough and therefore never get the chance to be on the explore page no matter the views. You know a project is indexed if the project show up when you search for it.



4. Trending hacks

Trending hacks are still a thing and they encourage spam. There is now not a single project in the ‘'Games’' tab that do not use atleast one trending hacks. Because these hacks are so powerful (make your project go higher on trending) and because almost everyone uses them, if you want your project to show up in the ‘'games’' tab it's almost required that you use them too. I know 4 of these hacks and they are all caused by the same thing explained in the post I made about these hacks.

These hacks do not directly have an impact on the project's position on the ‘'All’' tab, but they have a huge impact on the other tab such as ‘'Animations’', ‘'Games’' tabs etc. These hacks result in a lot of spam on project pages

More detail here: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/656956/


5. The reshare glitch semi fixed

Right now, once a project gets on trending for the first time, it is stuck in the same order and the only way for a project to change its order and go higher on trending is to reshare the project. This explains why resharing have an impact on a project’s position. This bug means for example that if a project appears on the 2nd page of trending, it will never go on the first page unless if reshared. I recommend clicking on the link below.

Edit august 2023: Resharing is now ineffective, but it seems like the main reason why resharing did something in the first place has still not been fixed. If you check the explore page api, you see that the stats used to order the project on explore are still completly outdated. Resharing used to update your project stats so that the stats used by the algorithm to order project match the real stats, but now it seems like resharing does not do anything anymore.

More detail here: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/654013/









If you know more Explore page glitches, feel free to leave a post and I'll make sure to add them in the list.

This will certainly help sort out these issues and will function as a reusable bug report. But you might want to remove the list of cheats/hacks on item #3 from here if you intend for this to become a sticky topic because they could probably go against the terms of use.

D-ScratchNinja wrote:

This will certainly help sort out these issues and will function as a reusable bug report. But you might want to remove the list of cheats/hacks on item #3 from here if you intend for this to become a sticky topic because they could probably go against the terms of use.

Thank you, but if I remove them, I'm not sure if the Scratch team will know which specific hacks I'm talking about. I'm not sure what to do.

D-ScratchNinja wrote:

This will certainly help sort out these issues and will function as a reusable bug report. But you might want to remove the list of cheats/hacks on item #3 from here if you intend for this to become a sticky topic because they could probably go against the terms of use.

Ok I removed the list

Bump

Added a fifth bug

Oh..Woah! :O

lovedbyair_67 wrote:

Oh..Woah! :O

..Anything else?
Okay moving on I guess
thanks to this stupid so called 60 second devil or as I will call it 60 second satan I had to write this pointless text.

((◉◡◉::#30c0f0) (O w O::#59e010) (◑◞◐::#f7c81b) (.__.::#f56e07) (◡⁔◡::#f71b6c)::#754e19

It's good that someone has grouped the whole situation into one post. Thanks to this, there will be no such confusion on forum posts, related to it.

Bump

alexandretherrien wrote:

D-ScratchNinja wrote:

This will certainly help sort out these issues and will function as a reusable bug report. But you might want to remove the list of cheats/hacks on item #3 from here if you intend for this to become a sticky topic because they could probably go against the terms of use.

Thank you, but if I remove them, I'm not sure if the Scratch team will know which specific hacks I'm talking about. I'm not sure what to do.

You can always contact the Scratch Team to share exploitable bugs privately.

The explore page has been stuck for 12 days now. This just feels like an endless cycle! Is this going to last forever? Like, this has already been going on for 15+ months. The explore page and as importantly, the indexer/crawler are completely broken and do not work 75% of the time. Sharing a project basically lost its main purposes because projects can't even show up in the search results and on the explore page. There are so many bugs and their effects just combine to create the most unfair and unreliable page on Scratch. On top of that, the language bug (#1 on the bug list) is a huge accessibility issue. I think that fixing these bugs should be the top priority.

bump

I am curious why the “trending hack” (if i'm correct on what the “hack” is) works. Maybe each love/favorite is multiplied by the amount of times you “hacked” it?

CoconutGator wrote:

I am curious why the “trending hack” (if i'm correct on what the “hack” is) works. Maybe each love/favorite is multiplied by the amount of times you “hacked” it?

I’m not talking about this. The hack/cheat I’m talking about is based on the fact that the ‘’games’’ ‘’animations’’ ‘’art’’… tabs on explore work similarly (probably exactly the same) to the search results. In fact when you search for something like ‘’Dog’’ with the search bar, the results all contains the word ‘’dog’’ either in the title are in the description. The projects that show up first are, first, the most popular (most loves), but second, the projects where the word ‘’dog’’ is the largest part of the description and title.


Example: If your project is called: ‘’A dog’’ it will show up before another game with the same stats called ‘’This is my dog that I just bought yesterday’’ because in the first project, the word ‘’dog’’ represents a higher proportion (50%) of the title while in the second one it only represents 11% of the title. It’s the same with the description.

Other example: If a project has as its description: ‘’This is my dog! dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.’’ It will show up higher in the results for dog than a project with just ‘’ this is my dog that I love so much’’ as its description because in the first one the word ‘’dog’’ constitutes a bigger part of the description.

The tabs on explore works exactly the same. So a project called ‘’platformer games games games games games’’ will show up higher on the ‘’games‘’ tab than another project with the same stats called ‘’scrolling platfomer with enemies and level editor games’’, because in the first one, the tag ‘’games’’ represent a higher part of the title than the second one.

So this weird system can be exploited in 2 ways:

1. You spam as many tags as you can in the description so that the tag represents a very big part of the description/title

2. You make your description/title just one tag so that the tag represents 100% of the title/description. For example a project simply called ‘’games’’ with, as description, (or notes and credits) ‘’games’’ and nothing else, will be catapulted in the first results of the ‘’games’’ tab way higher than it should.

This is why you see so many scratchers spamming hundreds of tags in the description to make their project show up higher on the tabs of the explore page. That’s also why when you search words like ‘’mario’’ or ‘’portal’’ the first results are almost always just called ‘’mario’’ or just ‘’portal’’. This weird system works ok for the search results but for the tabs on the explore page, it leads to a lot of spam.

The only tab that is not directly affect by this is the ‘’all’’ tab


This is what I noticed with the tabs on explore and the search results. I hope this clarified things up

alexandretherrien wrote:

Example: If your project is called: ‘’A dog’’ it will show up before another game with the same stats called ‘’This is my dog that I just bought yesterday’’ because in the first project, the word ‘’dog’’ represents a higher proportion (50%) of the title while in the second one it only represents 11% of the title. It’s the same with the description.

Wait, really? I thought the search results were just based on the number of views, loves, and favourites.

for \({
set [i v] to [0]
}; <(i) < [10]>; {
change [i v] by (1)
}) \{{
think (i) for (1) secs
}} :: control

The Scratch Forums support bf +-<>[],.

alexandretherrien wrote:

-snip-

That's actually what I was referring to, I just didn't want to say it because I thought it would be better if I didn't.
Thanks for the explanation though!

The whole explore page and the search system have now been stuck for almost 3 weeks. This needs to be fixed now

The updating system is slow like a turtle. It never even updated

It has now been 25 days since the explore page and the search page have stopped working. There has been a lot of people noticing that their projects are not showing on search because the indexer is down. Here are some forum threads that I found all on the same topic (projects don't show up on search). These were created in the last 2 days:

- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/639241/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/639283/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/639159/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/639063/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/639109
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/636881/

Here's a few about the explore page being stuck:

- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/638854/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/637061/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/622820/
- https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/634604/

These forum threads are all on the same topic and it's pretty inefficient to have all of these duplicates on the same topic. I think that a topic should be stickied to the top of the Bug and Glitches forum so that we can talk about this topic in one place instead of having a bunch of duplicates.