Comment (website feature)

For other uses, see Comment (disambiguation).

A comment that has been replied to.

A comment is a message that is posted on a project, studio or profile page. Users are also able to reply to comments; replies are only one level deep, but a user can choose to reply to any specific comment in a reply chain. Replies are automatically prefaced with @username to indicate whom they are meant for. In the case of profiles and projects, comments can be deleted by Scratch Team members or the owner of the profile/project. However, in the case of studios, comments can only be deleted by the Scratch Team. The exception to this is that managers of a studio can delete their own comments in the studio. Comments are automatically removed when reported inappropriate by two or more users. However, there are checks in place to ensure the two reports are from two separate users. As of June 2024, there are over 980 million comments.

Only project and studio comments existed until profile comments were added in Scratch 2.0.

The box that comments are posted in on project/studio pages.

Usage

Comments are the primary method of communication on the Scratch website. Comments are used to give feedback and constructive criticism on projects and studios. They are also used to message, notify, ask questions, and have conversations with other Scratchers.

Notifications

Example of a comment notification that has been read.

See also: Messages and Notifications

When a comment is posted, a message is sent to the owner of the project or profile. Users are also notified when their comments are replied to.

Emojis

Main article: Scratch Emoji

Emojis are features in comments which allow users to create specific images by typing an underscore, the name of the image, followed by another underscore. Examples include _meow_ (a Scratch Cat face) and _waffle_ (an image of a waffle). These are not actually emojis in the traditional sense, rather they are simply images embedded to the comment text by the Scratch website.

Restrictions

To prevent spam and malicious use, restrictions were added to commenting on Scratch:

• Comments may only be placed by logged in users
• Comments have a maximum length of 500 characters
• Comments cannot use 10 or 11 numerical digits in a row (designed to prevent the sharing of phone numbers)
• Comments with the same content cannot be posted more than three times in a short while
• Comments may not contain censored words or phrases
• Comments can be disabled by the owner of the profile, project, or studio
• Comments are subject to a rate limit (10 seconds for Scratchers and 30 seconds for New Scratchers)
• Most emojis and unicode characters are automatically removed upon posting a comment
• Comments cannot be blank (no characters)
  • There is a known workaround for posting empty comments using empty looking characters
• In studios, there is a limit of 25 comments in each thread.

Constructive Criticism

Constructive criticism is advice that is given to someone which is useful and intended to help or improve something. Under the Community Guidelines, the Scratch Team encourages Scratchers to leave constructive criticism in comments on others' projects, rather than unfriendly, unhelpful, or spam criticism. Good constructive criticism usually points out a project's strengths, then politely gives ideas for future improvement.

An example of constructive criticism is "Very nice project! Maybe you could add ________? I liked _______."

An example of non-constructive criticism is "YOUR PROJECT SUCKS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HAVE _______!". Non-constructive comments like this one should be reported.

Disabling Comments

The slider to toggle commenting on a project.

An example of a profile with commenting turned off.

Commenting can be disabled on a profile, studio, or project by its owner or the Scratch Team.

Comment Data Transfer

The appearance of comment sections on profiles during the data transfer

On August 23^rd, 2021, all profile comments were disabled in order for the comment data to be transferred to a new cloud database. Continued updates occurred on September 13^th, 2021, but profile comments were not disabled.

Filter Outage on 2022-04-12

Main article: 2022-04-12 Censor Outage

On April 12, 2022, the filter bot stopped working completely for a reason that has not been officially confirmed yet, which resulted in a large insurgence of trolls registering accounts with inappropriate usernames and submitting inappropriate posts. As the result, all comments were closed and hidden from the public and the Scratch Discussion Forums were put under Maintenance Mode.

Blank Comments

Blank Comments are comments that have no text written on them. Theoretically, due to the Scratch Censor, blank comments should not exist. Although Scratch prevents users from posting blank comments, some Scratchers manage to post empty comments. People can use special characters or emojis, most notably Variation Selector 16 (U+FE0F), which appears blank on most clients. Although a comment posted with an invisible unicode character appears blank to the client, the comment is technically not blank, which is why a comment with one of these characters is not blocked upon posting. These blank comments are sometimes used for spamming, which means a large number of them should be reported.

Blank comments may be posted by using a large number of food emojis in a comment, which will cause the emojis to appear invisible because comments do not support Unicode characters with high codepoints. They may also be posted by using other special characters.

Limitations

Scratch only supports characters with a Unicode code point of 1 to 65535, inclusive. This means, among other things, that most emoji can't be used on Scratch. The emoji that can be used are not actually emoji, but are just rendered like emoji on most platforms.

See Also

• Comment (Scratch Suggestions)