On November 30, 2023, the discussion forums were updated. After a significant downtime in the previous 7 days, the forums were restored, with multiple updates having taken place:
- The Discussion Forums now use the same censor as the rest of the site[1]
- The mobile view has been removed[2]
- Recently created accounts cannot post to the forums[3]
- This does not prevent all New Scratchers from posting to the forums; New Scratchers are still able to post to the forums as long as their account was not created too recently[4], and they have participated in some activity on the main website[citation needed]
These changes to the forums were made to take advantage of an already existing maintenance period to add anti-abuse measures.
| “ | The forums was capable of being a nasty lag monster, and one of the monster-transformation triggers is the forum moderation tools becoming unwieldy due to the forum's large size and age (it's been around for about a decade now). So yeah, there was a forum troll, a mod was trying to clean the forum space up as normal, and forums got turned into a lag monster.
The filter change stuff was kind of a last-minute spur of the moment thing (our engineers took advantage of the longer-than-usual forum maintenance period). Since it was a rush thing put together over Thanksgiving, it isn't perfect |
” |
– cheddargirl, on this post | ||
Censor Change
The forums now have the same censor as the rest of the site; when a user attempts to post something to the forums that goes against the censor, it will not be posted, although, unlike the main site, the user will not be muted.[1] As a result, the forums were no longer used for reporting censor issues since they could not be posted to the forums either.[5]
The previous filter was not removed, so posting anything that is blacklisted on the forums, but not the main site, will still be replaced with an asterisk. In addition, assets.scratch.mit.edu/get_image, after previously being added to the blacklist due to abuse in comments, was no longer usable on the forums. The Scratch Team stated that it would not be removed, as hosting images on the forums is not the intended use case of the Assets server.[6]
References
- ↑ a b File:Cannot Post To Forums Via Filter.png
- ↑ scratch:discuss/m
- ↑ File:New Account No Forums Access.png
- ↑ Name_Sniped. (2023-11-30). "Not exactly “New” but perhaps new to the forums. This is a test." post:7669103
- ↑ Paddle2See. (2023-11-30). "The switch to the same filter as is used on the rest of the site makes this topic much less useful. It would probably be best to use Contact Us with your filter questions. Thanks to everybody that helped out here." post:7668203
- ↑ Paddle2See. (2023-11-30). "As I recall, it was blocked on the main site because it was being abused in comments and spam attacks. My tests show that cubeupload links are still accepted as an image host on the forums - that seems like what folks should be using. It was never our intent to have assets.scratch.mit.edu be used as a general purpose image host for non-project images." post:7667728
