The censor, also known as the bad word detector[1], filterbot or simply filter, filters certain words or phrases and alerts the user that what they wrote is against Community Guidelines. As a rigid rule, profanity is a violation of the Terms of Use and Community Guidelines. As such, all parts of the Scratch Website and Scratch Wiki utilize some type of censor. Additionally, posting references to inappropriate topics or links to unmoderated chat sites are also often censored. In addition, some words trigger a "soft report" where the Scratch Team is notified but the comment is not blocked.[2]
Scratch Website
- Main article: Mute
On the Scratch Website, if a blacklisted string is encountered in a comment, it is automatically disallowed from being posted onto the website, the user who posts the comment is automatically temporarily muted, and the Scratch Team is notified. Scratchers are encouraged to report bugs with the filter in a stickied Bugs and Glitches topic.[3] The filter on the Scratch Website is implemented with Cleanspeak.[4] The filter is also stricter for New Scratchers than it is for Scratchers.[5]
The message that shows when commenting inappropriate words or phrases
The message that shows when commenting personal information, or the name or URL of a innappropiate website or chat app
The second message explaining a user is temporarily muted
How the mute looks on old style pages
Notable Filtered Topics
In addition to inappropriate words or phrases, the censor also filters out a number of other things that are not necessarily inappropriate but nevertheless unsuitable for Scratch. Notably, the word "discord" is censored regardless of context (one can get muted for commenting that contains that word) since it is the name of a service that allows private or unmoderated chatting. The filter also incorrectly filters out some words in non-English languages, because they may have an inappropriate meaning in English. All strings containing 10 or 11 digits one after the other (without letters between them) are replaced with 10 or 11 X-s because they could be used for sharing phone numbers. The filter originally also blocked words that were themselves appropriate but contained inappropriate words in them, but this has been fixed by adding a whitelist.
Forums
On the Scratch Discussion Forums, censored words are replaced with an asterisk. No notification is sent upon posts with censored words, but if any are found, users are encouraged to report them.[citation needed] The forum censor was originally intended to be a stop-gap until the censor used on the rest of the website could be used, but as of July 2022 this has not occurred due to other issues taking higher priority.[6]
Account Creation Page
If someone tries to create an account that contains vulgar or censored terms, "Username not allowed" will be shown to the right of the screen.
Scratch Wiki
The Scratch Wiki has its own censoring system, using the MediaWiki extension AbuseFilter. It prevents actions from happening if anything contains inappropriate language, and otherwise blocks guideline-breaking actions.
Problems
Scratch 1.x Website
On the Scratch 1.x website, until late 2011, any word or phrase containing a censored string (such as "skyscraper", "grape", or "push it") was blocked due to an issue known as the Scunthorpe problem, where a censor encounters a false positive and flags a string not intended to be flagged. Since then, a whitelist was added containing many words and phrases that incorrectly trigger the censor.[7]
Scratch 2.0 Website and later
The censor technology sometimes causes problems in languages other than English. Swear words in those languages (unless spelled exactly the same as in English) are not censored.[8] Also, censored words in English may have other meanings or be included in words in other languages.[9]
With the spam filter, there have been problems such as the censor stopping users from posting innocent links, such as project and studio links.[10]
Censor outage on 2022-04-12
- Main article: Censor Outage on 2022-04-12
On April 12, 2022, the censor stopped working completely because of issues related to the system[11], which resulted in a large insurgence of trolls registering accounts with inappropriate usernames and submitting inappropriate comments and Discussion Forums posts. As the result, all comments were closed and hidden from the public and the Discussion Forums were put under Maintenance Mode until the censor returned back to normal.
Other Uses
- To reduce commercial spam, the censor has been also known to filter out numbers often used by commercial spammers.
- This part has been stopped due to problems caused.[12]
- Similarly, the censor filters out words and phrases commonly used by spammers, such as "escort" and "customer service".
- The censor has been reportedly filtering out ASCII art.[13]
- On the forums, the censor has sometimes been used for things other than swear words. Prior to a registration list of user-created websites, the domain names of some popular website creating services, such as Weebly, were censored. Alongside, certain shortened links were censored because the shortened link may link to inappropriate sites or pages with malware.
- On April Fools' Day, the forum censor has been used for some jokes. In 2011, this was primary, but in 2012-13, the entire website had a joke theme (Neigh and Pico, respectively), and the censoring was a strengthening of the joke.[citation needed]
- Links to sites primarily for private or unmoderated messaging, including Google Docs and Discord, are censored.[14]
- To reduce unmoderated chat through livestreams, terms such as "livestream" are censored, and YouTube channels/videos containing livestreams and premiers are strictly prohibited, regardless of chat being disabled or not.[15]
- To prevent inappropiate sites, TinyUrl, Bitly, and other related link shorteners are censored in comments. They are also not allowed in signatures.[16]
- Names of some Scratch-related browser extensions are filtered out, as mentioning them is against the Community Guidelines.[17]
Controversies
It has been alleged that the Scratch Team had forgotten to censor certain terms, even major vulgar insults. While some minor profanities remain uncensored, they are still censored in the forums, which confused many to think that it was censored. In addition, using blank tags can also help bypass the censors in the forums.[18] Innocent terms, such as "homophone,"[19] were censored due to typos, but were later on uncensored after the Scratch Team had confirmed that these censors were made due to typos.[20]
References
- ↑ "Hmm...the bad word detector thinks there is a problem with your comment. Please change it and remember to be respectful." (scratch:js/splash.intl.js)
- ↑ topic:6494548[dead link]
- ↑ topic:235220
- ↑ scratch:parents
- ↑ post:1795039
- ↑ post:6486638
- ↑ Lightnin. (3/11/2011). "I'll add them to the whitelist so they don't set off the filter anymore." ar-post:983156
- ↑ lisafireball. (22/4/2014). "I can curse and stuff in a different language." topic:36504
- ↑ Little_sweet_girl. (10/3/2014). "when I am saying about the Vocaloid Song “Fukkireta”, the anime “Kurosh i tsuji” or…" topic:32001
- ↑ cs96871. (14/1/2016). I go to post the link to the studio and what do I get? “Hmm…the bad word detector thinks there is a problem with your text. Please change it and remember to be respectful.” topic:178341
- ↑ post:6206238
- ↑ Paddle2See. (22/2/2016). "I've shut those filters off for now - it should work for you." post:1808094
- ↑ Mecha11_. (20/4/2017). "Text Sans is classed as inappropriate language[title]" topic:250794
- ↑ Paddle2See. (7/8/2016). "Please don't do that as it would be considered unmoderated private chatting." post:2237570
- ↑ post:4971824
- ↑ post:4719530[dead link]
- ↑ ceebee. (30/11/17). "We want to announce today that we’re shifting our policy related to browser extensions, userscripts, userstyles, and other similar external software. We’ve decided that, for safety reasons, we are no longer going to allow these to be advertised on Scratch." topic:284272
- ↑ topic:495897
- ↑ post:5122097
- ↑ topic:493537
