I'm a bit new to Scratch so I had to read the guidelines when I was invited to be Scratcher. Not seeing anything about advertisements, I made advertisements that weren't copypasta spam but definitely ads. Later I got a warning saying something to the effect of advertising of any kind is not allowed. This rule isn't on the Scratch Community Guidelines page and I would like to know where the real rules are. I don't want to learn the rules through the mess around and find out approach.

This was probably asked before but I can't find a Discussion Forums search feature.

There are no rules other than the community guidelines.Unfortunately, they are quite vague but that's all we've got.
Advertising is allowed unless the project creator says they don't want it.

they might be in ToS, although idrk

Scratch's rules are currently a mess. Some of them are in the community guidelines, some are in the Terms of Service that you can find a link to at the bottom of every page (it's kind of hard to read), some are in the FAQ which they've recently deleted, some are in random forum posts from moderators… I, a Scratcher since 2021, am pretty sure that the most efficient way to know the rules is the “mess around and find out” approach that you mentioned.

About your situation specifically, advertising is generally allowed if you don't spam and you do it in appropriate areas, like a studio or forum topic related to what you're advertising, the Show and Tell forum, user profiles. Note that if any of these have a user-defined rule of “no advertising” (like in a user's About Me or a studio's description), then you may not advertise there. But do note that advertising is generally discouraged except in areas that specifically allow it, like the Show and Tell forum, so be careful!

DefNotYarrow wrote:

Scratch's rules are currently a mess. Some of them are in the community guidelines, some are in the Terms of Service that you can find a link to at the bottom of every page (it's kind of hard to read), some are in the FAQ which they've recently deleted, some are in random forum posts from moderators… I, a Scratcher since 2021, am pretty sure that the most efficient way to know the rules is the “mess around and find out” approach that you mentioned.

About your situation specifically, advertising is generally allowed if you don't spam and you do it in appropriate areas, like a studio or forum topic related to what you're advertising, the Show and Tell forum, user profiles. Note that if any of these have a user-defined rule of “no advertising” (like in a user's About Me or a studio's description), then you may not advertise there. But do note that advertising is generally discouraged except in areas that specifically allow it, like the Show and Tell forum, so be careful!

Thanks for your response. Didn't think to read through the ToS since I'm not a lawyer and I don't think I will on account of the boring serifed font. I must've missed a “no ads plz” in someone's description but advertising under someone's project is a little scummy so I won't do that again. Definitely will try to channel the essence of the mods in the future.

Like a half of the scratch rules are in fragments. Think of it like an egg hunt but for your own rule following and sanity.
Banned franchise, rules on advertising, rules on blood and violence, rules on scraping, etc

Scratch_Cat_Coder8 wrote:

Like a half of the scratch rules are in fragments. Think of it like an egg hunt but for your own rule following and sanity.
Banned franchise, rules on advertising, rules on blood and violence, rules on scraping, etc

Correct.
You can find bits of rules scattered around the site, and the only actual list is quite vague.

The Rules/Regulation Updates section of the Announcements Directory is probably what you're looking for. It has links to the guidelines for specific things like advertising, chat projects and shared accounts.

The same content can be found on this page as well.

Yeah we need a general CoC page if you ask me

Maximouse wrote:

The Rules/Regulation Updates section of the Announcements Directory is probably what you're looking for. It has links to the guidelines for specific things like advertising, chat projects and shared accounts.

The same content can be found on this page as well.

There is also this itopic: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/843872/