Scratch

No, they are not necessary. But from what happened to Misc., if we get rid of RaP and MaC, there will be TONS of users quitting.
for point 1, I completely agree with you
for point 2, I'm not sure that really matters, as it's just about a quarter of a second more.
for point 3, the spam I usually see happens everywhere in the forums, so it'll just be more condensed into the categories that are left.
for point 4, that's not going to happen. No-one's going to do that, because whenever the scratch team says make a project on it (when closing something in RaP or MaC), no-one does. And if they did, there would be tens of thousands of projects, all for the same topic (which will probably be mine craft), and everyone will stick to their own minecraft discussion project, and then quit all the more for no one viewing their project.
I say keep it as is, because in MaC and RaP you still learn. Because of MaC, I now know a lot more about HTML and Javascript then I would've otherwise.
There will also be a huge amount of spam of topics that would go in RaP or MaC, that now have nowhere to go. So, it will increase spam, increase loading times on the main site, where there are more users, and if the moderators are overworked, they can just get more. There are at least 10 users willing to be moderators, who are easily qualified.

1. The mods are plenty effective. If there is a need for more mods then there would be an election.
2. They don't slow them down hardly any.
3. If someone is gonna spam then they don't care where.
4. Discussion is educational.

This website is largely about Scratch coding, but it's also a bit of a social place and a place to learn!

Thanks to those forums, I've learned a lot of useful stuff that I wouldn't have learned elsewhere. I have also been able to have some pretty nice discussions with other Scratchers talking about stuff they've done that's not Scratch.

1. Maybe
2. If you really want to focus on that, people not deleting their notifications slows down the server a LOT more than those two forums. I know a lot about SQL, and know that those two forums have negligible impact on the loading times.
3. Um, no. There will be more spam, because people can't post their non-Scratch topics anywhere. So, they'll post it in other forums and the mods will have to spend unnecessary time closing/deleting them.
4. If they can't post their non-Scratch stuff on the forums, they'll just be annoyed. Almost nobody actually does make a project when the ST says it would be a good one. Also, when discussing on projects, the discussion format isn't as nice. It can get confusing with comments and replies and seeing which comment is responding to which, etc. Also, there's no BBCode, so you can't add images or links to aid the discussion, or quote somebody to make it clearer what you're responding to.

You see, these parts of the forums allow others to share opinions in a different way than a project; sometimes, what you have to say that belongs in these two forum categories can sometimes be hard to put in a project that is eye catching and gets lots of views, especially to an unknown user, whereas the topics in the forums can be bumped if it's not getting noticed (you cannot do that with projects, and unless a lot of people friend you, it may not get noticed as much), and they usually get TONS more views.  It's also somewhat easier to communicate; it's updated almost as soon as a post is made, whereas on the main site, ten minutes can sometimes go by without a notification.  I see what you are saying, but I don't agree.

JH1010 wrote:

Hmm... good points but I think that if there was a project for every MaC and RaP there would be a lot more learning.

No, there wouldn't, because there wouldn't be a way to see who has a project already for what topic, and they'll keep to themselves, and also every single point said in my previous post will happen.

JH1010 wrote:

1) Two less forums to manage means that moderators are more efficient/effective.
2) Two less forums means less clogging up the forums meaning faster loading times.
3) Massive decrease in spam.
4) Huge spike in the number of projects being created because they become like Misc. threads therefore more learning, which is what Scratch is all about.

Thank You For Reading.

4) ...And this huge spike in projects would slow down the website even more, considering your typical project uses a lot more bandwidth (uploading, storing, and then when viewed by users), than your typical forum thread, contradicting point 2.

This huge spike you talk about would also most likely be caused by "spam" projects (used to talk about a topic in the comments - the project itself might be just a background with some music), and not actual, scripted projects, contradicting point 3.

As for point 1, someone already mentioned that our moderators are quite efficient at their jobs, and to that I'll add that spam and flaming aren't even something that happens often at our forum.

A forum is also a much more organized and tidy way to discuss, than in a project - people can find topic about stuff they like, much more easily than they can find a Scratch project or gallery about it. One can reply to others using the [quote] tag, which is much less limiting than Scratch's nested comments system.

tl;dr: no

@ThisThreadsTitle: yes, MaC and RaP are necessary. They make scratch a better place by existing.

jvvg wrote:

This website is largely about Scratch coding, but it's also a bit of a social place and a place to learn!

Thanks to those forums, I've learned a lot of useful stuff that I wouldn't have learned elsewhere. I have also been able to have some pretty nice discussions with other Scratchers talking about stuff they've done that's not Scratch.

1. Maybe
2. If you really want to focus on that, people not deleting their notifications slows down the server a LOT more than those two forums. I know a lot about SQL, and know that those two forums have negligible impact on the loading times.
3. Um, no. There will be more spam, because people can't post their non-Scratch topics anywhere. So, they'll post it in other forums and the mods will have to spend unnecessary time closing/deleting them.
4. If they can't post their non-Scratch stuff on the forums, they'll just be annoyed. Almost nobody actually does make a project when the ST says it would be a good one. Also, when discussing on projects, the discussion format isn't as nice. It can get confusing with comments and replies and seeing which comment is responding to which, etc. Also, there's no BBCode, so you can't add images or links to aid the discussion, or quote somebody to make it clearer what you're responding to.

*applause*

technoguyx wrote:

JH1010 wrote:

1) Two less forums to manage means that moderators are more efficient/effective.
2) Two less forums means less clogging up the forums meaning faster loading times.
3) Massive decrease in spam.
4) Huge spike in the number of projects being created because they become like Misc. threads therefore more learning, which is what Scratch is all about.

Thank You For Reading.

4) ...And this huge spike in projects would slow down the website even more, considering your typical project uses a lot more bandwidth (uploading, storing, and then when viewed by users), than your typical forum thread, contradicting point 2.

This huge spike you talk about would also most likely be caused by "spam" projects (used to talk about a topic in the comments - the project itself might be just a background with some music), and not actual, scripted projects, contradicting point 3.

As for point 1, someone already mentioned that our moderators are quite efficient at their jobs, and to that I'll add that spam and flaming aren't even something that happens often at our forum.

A forum is also a much more organized and tidy way to discuss, than in a project - people can find topic about stuff they like, much more easily than they can find a Scratch project or gallery about it. One can reply to others using the [quote] tag, which is much less limiting than Scratch's nested comments system.

tl;dr: no

Exactly.

Last edited by Mokat (2012-11-19 08:10:15)

I don't think that should happend. If that happends i quit.

soniku3 wrote:

I don't think that should happend. If that happends i quit.

I would just complain & complain & complain ...

TorbyFork234 wrote:

zammer990 wrote:

TorbyFork234 wrote:

No, they are not necessary. But from what happened to Misc., if we get rid of RaP and MaC, there will be TONS of users quitting.

While I agree with the rest of your post this bit caught my eye.
If a user is only on scratch for those two forums, why should it matter if they quit, considering the main point of scratch is coding. No one else is going to quit just because two forums closed.

From what I could see from Misc. (I wasn't there, I'm not entirely sure, please correct me if I'm wrong), the people who quit were people who were there for Misc., yes, but they also helped out the community a lot in other ways. Such as helping people with scripts, make awesome projects, etc...

Actually, it's more like they stopped helping and purely stuck with Miscellaneous.    Kind of sad that they left for the love of Miscellaneous rather than because they moved on to another programming language after exhausting Scratch - but having people stick around purely for non-Scratch reasons isn't good either.

Going back to the Mac and RaP issue: Technically, we could do without Mac and RaP if we go down to the bare-bone structure, but I think it's important to consider what happened to Miscellaneous in order to understand why Mac and RaP are here in the first place.

Back when Miscellaneous was in place, it eventually degraded into an absolute mess with topic that not only was far away from what Scratch was about, it led to a rather dangerous situation where users would ask for help on issues where real help intervention was needed rather than an online one. The original plan back then was to get rid of Miscellaneous for good (as in no non-Scratch talk whatsoever), but at the same time, we found some benefits to talking about certain non-Scratch topics - specifically, those that involved in creating something and talking about our favorite media. The result is what we have today as MaC and RaP, which basically allows us to keep the topics that we would like to encourage while preventing an en masse threads that made the forums a mess earlier during the reign of Miscellaneous.

Given from what happened back then to what is going on now, it's actually a lot more quieter around here and more constructive than before. And we've also seen a huge rise in Collaborations in the forums after the forum restructure, which is quite amazing. At this point, I don't think we would remove it on the basis of the forums being unnecessary.

-> On a side note: for those who said that they would quit if MaC and RaP were gone: Please don't take my comment as some kind of victory. While the MaC and RaP forums are there, we don't want them being the core reason why Scratchers are staying on Scratch in the first place.