New Forum rules

Announcements
1

The Snap! Forum is for discussion of Snap! (including requests for help, bug reports, tutorials, feature requests, and extensions), discussion of computer science (and related sciences), and discussion of teaching Snap! and computer science (including the BJC and TEALS curricula and the SAP MOOCs).

We understand that adolescents and teenagers need a place to socialize; there's nothing wrong with that. But we can't be that place; we can't afford the level of moderation staff such a forum requires.

The forum is specifically not for discussion of why you do or don't like Scratch [sic], and not for advertising commercial products. (The latter will result in instant and permanent banning.)

Don't find clever hacks to evade forum moderation. You will be banned.

You may not use the forum to arrange off-site meetings. Sorry, but we would get in big trouble.

We believe that the overwhelming majority of our users are teenagers or adults, and so we aim for a PG-13 level of moderation. This means, for example, that Snap! versions of T-rated ("Teen") video games can be discussed. By popular demand, we are now prohibiting swear words throughout the site, including the forum. (What you do in unshared projects is your own business.) We do not, at this time, use software filters for moderation; decisions are made by human moderators.

Appeals of moderation decisions may be sent to moderators@snap.berkeley.edu.

5

Yes. The forum is up.

We are going to try to set a better tone for the forum by being very strict about moderation, at least for a while, depending how it works. Please gang, do not make a game of testing the limits.

(Thanks for reminding me, we might make a rule limiting the height of sigs.)

7

Looks like the Forum is back up. Finally. Also, what happened to Anonymous mode? And why was I automatically watching this even though I didn't set the notifs like that?

Am I asking too many questions?

11

Over time we are going to be experimenting with various forum settings. We're not going to discuss each one; the general principle is that we want this to be a serious forum and we'll do whatever helps with that.

So, yeah, too many questions. :~)

13

[sigh] That's a rule for a reason, to discourage posts such as "ok." Just do it without responding...

14

What happened to my Username? It used to be all caps...now it's all lower case letters.

(Another question lol.)

25

I deleted a bunch of offtopic replies. I also deleted one worthy reply, about our mail-spam bug, because this isn't the place for bug reports, and it's already been reported there.

Closing this topic. We've decided not to answer questions about small details of our forum settings, which are subject to change as we see how things go here.

27

Added:

Don't find clever hacks to evade forum moderation. You will be banned.

I get really grumpy after wasting a Sunday evening intended for better things on cleaning up after one of you. I naively thought this rule would be obvious but I guess not. :~(