Scratch

Hey guys. I hope this doesn't get lost of the sea of Minecraft and random things in the MIscellaneous Pit, but I honestly don't know where to put this.(I'm not complaining, if you wanted to argue with me)

This is a project I have been working on, hopefully released soon. All I want is some ideas on this on how to improve it, some comments, etc. I have separated this into some FAQ style thing so it is semi-readable. Enjoy!

BEGIN THE WALL!

So what is word of scratch?

SHORT EXPLANATION:

Word of Scratch is a website where you nominate projects to be displayed on the page where they are viewed. People who consistently make good projects are displayed more, but not if they are already noticed.

LONG EXPLANATION:

Word of Scratch is a website where every project deserves a chance to be featured. You start out by nominating your project to go on the Word of Scratch Front Page, where all the nominated projects go. Someone else can nominate your project, and it stays on a bit longer. You cannot 'bump' your project back up suddenly, it can take a while of nominations and loveits and such. Every single project gets at least a few hours of showing time. I have an idea for a special algorithm that ranks projects by their views and how many nominations/loveits/favorites they have.

People can further nominate your project, and they can also loveit it on the Scratch website, and comment on it on the Scratch website. You gain a reputation for making consistently loved/favorited projects, and the more reputation you have, the longer you stay.

Keep in mind, you only go on the Front Page if you don't have many views. People who already get at least 60-70 views would most likely have enough.

This sounds great! But what if you do this...

I'm freely open to suggestions, but I only take the ones I think actually contribute to the project.

Hey, I would like to be a part of this. Can I help?

I'm not fully sure I can work with people on this yet. I'm using some pretty advanced programming and design, if you want to help, either be a whiz at Python and Django-nonrel, or an awesome designer. Even then I don't think I want people to help me.

The only thing I really need is some documentation on how to extract loveits, views, etc. from a project URL, or some kind of pointer. I'm not fully sure how to do that yet. Also, some help on how to login using a Scratch username and password would be nice, as I'm also in the dark on how to do that.

What if people abuse the system?

1. People abuse the system here in order to get noticed, which this site does trivially
2. Really abusing the system would be pretty hard
3. I'll take care of it myself 

Original introduction and mission statement/blatant advertising

These paragraphs WERE an introduction: as my problem, my mission statement, and the thinking behind both. They also serve as blatant advertisement, and an example of a terribly written persuasive essay. If you want to read the good meat, go back to the headline that says 'so what is word of scratch?' in italic.

One of the main hurdles people have when using Scratch is that it is hard to get noticed. You put time and effort into a project, upload it, and it gets 3 views. Obviously, you're a bit anxious to get some views, maybe a comment, some suggestions on how to make it better. Then you wait for a month and it has 10 views. Putting it in Show and Tell gives it a couple more, but it is usually lost in a sea of people wanting to get noticed.

Now, this 'sea' I mentioned is interesting. One of the main things people want to do when browsing projects is find something good. The 'sea' is a giant mess of projects, and some may be good, some may be bad(not pointing any fingers here). People scan it for titles that look interesting(as people do) and maybe find something intriguing but it isn't what they are looking for.

So now we have a problem. We have an exponentially growing array of scratchers wanting to get noticed, and a potential market of hundreds of thousands of people who want to view projects, and no way to connect them. Word of Scratch will hopefully solve those problems.

Last edited by Greatdane (2011-08-15 16:51:02)