Please fill out these questions for all feature requests and bug reports. If you're requesting a feature, please let us know why this feature is important or useful, not just what it should do.
Thanks!
What browsers show this problem? all
Please share an example project (if possible). all
Describes the steps to reproduce this issue. go to a snap project
What does Snap! currently do? not have comments or views
What should Snap! do instead? have comments and view counts
Please add comments and view counts. It would make people think their project is being used and comments would let people suggest things.
Yeah. We are dipping our toes gingerly into the dangers of user feedback. Even on Scratch, it seems like each new user has to be taught how to behave (because their prior experience is, you know, YouTube and Twitter), and we don't have the staffing that Scratch does.
I'm pleased that we haven't had any major issues on the forum so far, knock on wood. We'll certainly get to adding comments to project pages.
I'm personally a little scared of view counts (let alone likes, which I hope we never have), because I don't want the experience to be about popularity. There's an amazing Scratch project that's a Scheme interpreter, using a list as a stack, but dating back to the days of no custom blocks at all, so it's just huge long scripts. It's not flashy and visual, and probably a dozen people have looked at it altogether, but if I had to choose a best-ever Scratch project, it'd be that one. (The author has no other posted projects and doesn't respond to messages, so I have no idea who it is!)
Some things to consider to combat spam or negative comments without staff intervention
Allow owner of project to decide on a project level if commenting is allowed or not. This would tell the world if they want or are open to feedback or not
Allow a user to ban another user. This would prevent the banned user from being able to comment on or view any of the banning users projects or comments and should aid in preventing bullying or harassment of any sort
Allow a user to remove comments on their own projects.
Give the ability for certain users (moderators could be extremely active community members that are trusted) the ability to remove certain comments or ban certain users from seeing other users. It would be assumed these members are long standing and responsible members who could carry this load.
The above working together should empower the community to police itself as is similar to some other sites I have helped moderate on before (the other sites were for gaining user feedback on projects as well so similar for sure). It should also prevent an extra large burden on the staff of Snap!
I'm a little nervous about the last one. For starters, we'd probably just let non-core-staff moderators hide a message and flag it for further review. If we don't end up reversing their decisions, then we'd expand their powers.
Flagging is fine! When you flag something, you're not just saying you don't like it; you're saying it violates a rule or a norm of behavior. Commenting, though, lets you say, for example, "This project is boring," which is an arbitrary value judgment.
Don't worry; we're going to allow comments on projects. We didn't want to try to roll out everything at once, which is a good thing, because we found (i.e., users found) plenty of problems with what we did release. And so we started with the most needed and least problematic capabilities.
Hello. I would love the ability to comment on projects, although I know that stuff like that can be very dangerous and could ruin Scratch, but we can probably do something about that to resolve it.