Scratch

When a project gets flagged as inappropriate an email is sent to a person in the Scratch team. The project is removed if it contains pointless violence, unkind words or very poor taste. Also, the flag is recorded in our database and if a project reaches more than certain number of flags it gets automatically deleted. This decision can be reverted by the administrators if the project is not considered inappropriate.

Unfortunately, more than 50% of the emails we get are false positives so we are going to start asking people to describe why the project is inappropriate otherwise the request will not go through.

Of course, it is very challenging to decide what is OK and what is not OK. Even within our team sometimes we do not agree.

In the future, we are going to implement a karma system that will assign different levels of trust to each user based on their actions. This way high-karma individuals might be able to delete a project while votes from low karma users will have a lot less value. How to gain and loose karma points is to be decided.

Thanks for the link to the BBC rules. Some of them seem very useful other seem overly restrictive.

hi Andres, and thanks for your detailed answer!  I too am impressed with the openness of your decision making process.  You guys are doing a great job with the website and Scratch as a whole. 

Just to let you know, we used Scratch for the first time yesterday in school for a whole day one off special activity as part of what we call Enhancement week.  We used it with year 9 (13 to 14 yr olds) who had never used it before, or anything similar.  It was a great success!  The only problem that we have is that for some ill-thought out reason our LEA blocks the Scratch website!  This was a shame, as it meant that the kids couldn't share their ideas during the day, or get inspiration from others. 

thanks again
:-)

ilikemangos wrote:

the problem is that anything criticizing generally accepted practices, such as animal testing, eating meat, religion, capitalism etc. has a high likelyhood of getting banned by groups of angry conservatives or mpeople with multile accounts

please don't bump old threads.

Magnie wrote:

fruit wrote:

ilikemangos wrote:

the problem is that anything criticizing generally accepted practices, such as animal testing, eating meat, religion, capitalism etc. has a high likelyhood of getting banned by groups of angry conservatives or mpeople with multile accounts

please don't bump old threads.

Who said he was bumping it?

Now that I know what happens when a project is flagged I won't be able to do it...    I don't ever check my E-Mails. I should get sent a message on scratch. Great.. then I'll be flooded with messages... lol But I'm always out to help keep the site clean!    But a thing I'm afraid of is *...    As long the project isn't that then I will be glad to help. 

Me to because then we have even greater problem. We don't want that!

ilikemangos wrote:

the problem is that anything criticizing generally accepted practices, such as animal testing, eating meat, religion, capitalism etc. has a high likelyhood of getting banned by groups of angry conservatives or mpeople with multile accounts

I think that that is a bit of an overstatement.
I myself am very conservative, yet I accept those criticisms to be the opinions of many individuals and groups, and that they have a right to have those opinions.
However, you are right that there will be some unfair flaggings based on opinion clashes. That is why I believe that the system of requiring an explanation of why it is inappropriate is a good one.