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The Contact Us page is a form that allows Scratchers to contact the Scratch Team via email for more serious or private concerns. The software Freshdesk is used by the Scratch Team for sending and recieving Contact Us messages. A link is found at the bottom of each page of the Scratch Website. It asks for an email address, a subject, and the message, along with an optional category. The Scratch Team receives many messages each day and may not always respond quickly.
Structure
The Contact Us page contains three sections.
See the FAQ — This section has a link to the Frequently Asked Questions page.
Ask the Community — This reminds users that they can look through and post questions in the Scratch Discussion Forums.
Need Support? — This section has a button called "Get Help" which lets users type a question about anything related to Scratch or to contact the Scratch Team.
Form Structure
When clicking on "Get Help" and clicking on the "Contact Us" button, a window will pop out with a searchbar to ask questions in and a button that leads to the Contact Us form.
 Note: | Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required. |
The form consists of:
- The user's name
- The user's email address*
- A topic dropdown*
- The subject of the message*
- The message*
- Scratch Name
- A box to drop files in (maximum of 5)
The topic dropdown has the following options to select on why the contacting is occuring:
- Teacher or student accounts
- Something inappropriate
- Problems with my account
- Question about notification or blocked account
- Privacy, copyright, or licensing
- Suggestion for Scratch
- Technical Issue
- Other
Hitting "Send" at the bottom of the page will deliver the message to the Scratch Team; a response will be given at the user's email address.
The Contact Us page also used to have a search bar for browsing on the forums prior to asking a question, but this feature was removed in Scratch 3.0.
Uses
These are common usages:
- To reset the user's password (however, changing via a special page is much easier and faster)
- If both the password and the e-mail address were lost, Contact Us will do.
- To report inappropriate things on Scratch (In case Report features are not working, or if the situation needs detail, not only a report.)
- To ask questions or suggest things that cannot be asked or suggested on the forums or on the comments, such as to censor certain vulgar terms, or questions that the user does not want to be publicly seen.
- To communicate privately between one and Scratch Team, for example, visiting MIT
- To report someone bypassing bans
- To appeal one's ban or alert
When Not to Use It
Any communication which does not exclusively need the Scratch Team's opinions should be posted on the forums. Communication that needs the attention of a Scratch Team member but does not necessarily need to be private (e.g. there is a typo on page 15 of the manual) could be posted as a comment on a Scratch Team member's profile. Alternatively, post on the forums, and report the post with an explanation like "Could an ST member look at this please?". However, questions like "Why was my project/studio removed?" should be asked only through Contact Us.
Alternatives
The email addresses for appealing, help, and copyright issues are all powered by Freshdesk; therefore, it is possible to contact the Scratch Team via email (see below for the email addresses).
Bans
- Main article: Ban
The ban page shows a special contact page, used for requesting to be unbanned. It is preferable to use this page than the ordinary contact page for appealing bans because the message is sent to a different email address of the Scratch Team. appeals@scratch.mit.edu is the email address used for appealing bans.
| Note: | IP banned users cannot contact the Scratch Team, due to Freshdesk's Internet Protocol ban function. Any messages sent during an IP ban will be invalidated. |
See Also
External Links
Email Addresses
- help@scratch.mit.edu for messages
- appeals@scratch.mit.edu for appealing permanent and network blocks
- copyright@scratch.mit.edu for copyright conflicts
