What Features to use for...

Forum Options: Essentials

The Essentials page allows you to set your email address and display times.  You can also see the number of posts, view all your posts, and see the IP registered with your moderator account.

Forum Options: Personality

The Personality page allows you to set your signature that all other users will see when you add a post.  All users have access to these features.

Forum Options: Display

The Display page allows you to set options for viewing posts, page layout and style.  All users have access to these features.

Forum Options: Privacy

The Privacy page allows you to set your privacy options and what information will be available for others to see when viewing your posts.

Forum Options: Email Digests

The Email Digests page allows you to sign up for and adjust settings to receive forum digests.  Forum digests are a daily or weekly email containing all/selected forum topics and posts.

Forum digests are a helpful way to review topics with new posts quickly, and provides links directly back to individual forum posts posts for immediate access.

You can elect to receive all forum posts, which is a lengthy email with every post that has appeared on any forum.  Or, you can select which forums topics for which you want to receive digests.  In addition, you can determine if you want to see complete or partial forum posts.

Forum Options: Administration

The Administration page allows you to delete or ban your own account. This is not to be confused with the Administration: Bans feature detailed below.  You will not be able to enter a user name here for banning.  It is not reccomended that you use this feature.

Administration: Index

The Index page displays the Administration features available to you.

Administration: Users

The Users page allows you to search for users using their name, email, signature, and a variety of other information to locate a user in our system.

 You can then view all posts by that user, view the number of posts by that user, and view the IP address.

Administration: Censoring

The Censoring page allows you to add and remove words from the censored word list.  Words on this list will be automatically filtered out of forum posts.  If you add a word to the filter list, you can determine what appears in it's place.  For default, we use the * symbol.

We ask that you consult with the Scratch Team prior to adding or removing any words on the filter list.

Administration: Bans

The Bans page allows you to ban user accounts and IP addresses from the forums.  Enter a user name and you will have the option of also banning the IP address associated with the account.

After entering a user name, you can ban an IP address.  Please enter a reason for banning as well as an expiration date for temporary bans.  If you are unsure of whether or not to ban a user or IP address permanently or temporarily, please contact the MIT Scratch Team to review the situation.  In general, we temporarily ban users for a week if they have posted a rude comment, argument or profanity, and we ban users permanently for continual hostile/inappropriate behavior or continual spamming.

Administration: Reports

The Reports page allows you to review and remove all forum posts that have been reported by members of the Scratch community.  To remove a forum posts from the list of reports, click on “Zap” to the left of the post.  This will remove the forum post from the reports list.  To delete, edit, or move any reported posts, follow the link to the post and delete, edit or move from there.  For details on how to delete, edit or move, please see the next section.

Forum Post: Delete

You can delete any forum post using the Delete feature.  If you delete the first post in a forum topic, the entire thread will be deleted.  If you do not want to delete the entire thread, but feel the post is inappropriate, please use the edit feature to remove the inappropriate content.  This will not delete the other post in the thread.

When to delete a post:

- When the person who posts is a new member of the community and posts a link to a commercial site unrelated to Scratch or the forum topic (spam)

- When the person posts an exceptionally derogatory, insulting, aggressive or threatening post

- When the person posts multiple forum posts advertising their projects in unrelated threads

Forum Post: Move

You can move any off-topic forum posts to another part of the forum or create a new topic using the Move feature.  You will have the option of moving all the posts to another topic, or just the single post.  If you are unsure where to move a topic, please contact the MIT Scratch Team to review.

Forum Post: Edit

You can edit any forum post and remove inappropriate content within a forum post without deleting the post by using the Edit feature.  If you do not want to delete an entire post, but would like to remove a piece of the post, the Edit feature is the best option.  If you edit a post, please include the following notation: [removed by moderator].

When to edit a post:

- If you do not want to delete an entire post, but would like to remove a piece of the post

- If you want to remove a signature but not a post

- If you want to remove contact information from a post 

- If you want to remove an off-topic external link