Scratch

Amos wrote:

Hi Miles!

Thanks for writing, and congrats on passing 300 blocks! The block library is amazing and I'm glad you and everyone else involved with it are expanding it to a new site.

Amos from the Scratch team has allowed us to have a "thumbs up" page hosted on the Scratch site that we can link to to show that the Scratch site trust us to keep user information safe when Scratch usernames and passwords are given!

Part of this request is that we allow them to view a live copy of all php pages containing the Scratch API, code and all, so that they can see that the username and password are never carried from that page. Is there a way we can let them see the live code for our pages WITHOUT having to give them the login details for the site? I don't mind doing that but it's awkward and not very neat...

Here is a full list of questions and answers shared currently between Amos and myself:

sparks wrote:

To what extent may we claim affiliation to Scratch and the Scratch website?

Amos wrote:

Just make it clear that your site is made by members of the Scratch community and not part of MIT or the official Scratch website (although, we do think it's awesome).  Explaining this on an "about" page or in fine print would be fine. If you want to run text by us / me (Amos / Lightnin), feel free to send it around, but I'm not worried about it. 

sparks wrote:

If a Scratch user submits something that is against the Scratch website Terms of Use on our website should we report them to you with evidence of their infringement as if it had ocurred on the Scratch site itself, or is the behaviour and track record of a Scratcher on our site not considered part of their behaviour on yours?

Amos wrote:

Well, that's a good question. Tracking things across domains like this could be kind of complicated. Have you had a lot of problems like this in the past? 
If not, I'm inclined to say not to worry about it, but to feel free to contact us if there are accounts used to repeatedly troll your site or do sneaky / malware type things.

I think in this case we needn't bother for the time being unless repeated problems occur, we can always ban scratchers from our site if they misbehave.

sparks wrote:

The user password is not stored once the API has been checked for obvious reasons but sharing their password outside of the Scratch site can of course quite rightly worry a user. Is there any way that the Scratch website can "thumbs up" our site on a page we can link to on the submission form if we, for example shared a live copy of the submission PHP file with you? This would allow you to see that the password is not carried outside of that page at any time.

Amos wrote:

Interesting!
As we move to Scratch 2.0, we're looking at doing something cool like using open authentication. But it's too soon to dive into that now. So I think the easiest short term solution is for us to make the thumbs up page you describe. Can you sketch one out and send us a draft? We'll tweak it and host it on info.scratch.mit.edu.

Last edited by sparks (2011-07-12 12:37:07)

We can't share our MySQL connection info publicly without creating an opening or hackers.

Last edited by sparks (2011-07-12 13:24:08)

I see what you're saying... 
Well, there could be a page where they can see it, but they just have to trust giving their passwords once. 

EDIT: @above posts:                      So true!
And what's <div class="breadcrumb"> on line 121?

Last edited by scimonster (2011-07-12 13:43:03)

sparks wrote:

scimonster wrote:

what's <div class="breadcrumb"> on line 121?

Breadcrumbs.

Oh.

Sparks, I sent you a email, but it just bounced back and had an error. 

sparks wrote:

Amos wrote:

Hi Miles!

Thanks for writing, and congrats on passing 300 blocks! The block library is amazing and I'm glad you and everyone else involved with it are expanding it to a new site.

Amos from the Scratch team has allowed us to have a "thumbs up" page hosted on the Scratch site that we can link to to show that the Scratch site trust us to keep user information safe when Scratch usernames and passwords are given!

Why not just have something like 'block.scratch.mit.edu' or 'blocklib.scratch.mit.edu'?

sparks wrote:

Funny you should say that, PF:

Hey Miles,

I spoke with Andresmh and he said we could provide you with some hosting at ScratchR.org if you like - that would be another way of showing you have legitimacy. He's super busy right now and we'll need to make sure it's all cool, but I think it should be possible. Would that work for you guys?

-Amos

Cool. 
blocklibrary.scratchr.org? I like it! XD

ProgrammingFreak wrote:

Uh, do you guys have Skype? I got it working on it. 

No.

Authentication page wrote:

The Block library is a resource created by several members of the Scratch community that allows users to share and view new blocks for Scratch, Panther and BYOB for free!

The Library website (http://www.theblocklibrary.site11.com) may ask you for your Scratch user-name and password when you submit, post or comment on it. It uses the Scratch API and does not store or pass-on either your user-name or your password.

The site has Scratch's thumbs up; sharing your Scratch user information on this site is safe and secure.

So yeah, all I saw was that you needed to probably add that hyphen to the 'pass on'. And I'm  not sure if 'user-name' is right. I always say 'username', but that could just be me.

User name is technically two words but most of the online community write username. I compensate when writing officially    And yet password is one word...

Edited pass on to pass-on

Sent off an email with that page plus a message saying that we would love to move to the scratchR domain providing we will all still have access to the project and still have php and MySQL usage 

You know, if we're going to be on scratchr.org rather than scratch.mit.edu, I don't think we need the exact same look as Scratch; see Scratch Resources.
I think we could add the Scratch logo to our regular logo, and I'll try and get something up tomorrow. :3
Also, instead of the Scratch nav bar at the top, we could have our own:

home | blocks | share | about | tutorials

(Tutorials is stuff like the "How do I add blocks..." pages.)
And we would have a login thing that looked like Scratch's though.
I think we could have Google search like this, but also a ▼ which brings up "advanced search" — the current site's search.
More suggestions tomorrow...

We can have our own menu bar, yes, and we can probably do Scratch-style logins but people don't really need to log in unless they're submitting a block unless we have commenting... I have built a comment system that could easily be adapted to our site if we need it, complete with quoting!