Scratch is an inspirational place for coding, socializing, and viewing creative projects about a variety of topics from a diverse and welcoming community. But nowadays, it’s become a lot less… safe. Scratch is a website for all ages, and I acknowledge that ST does a lot for the community. Typically, projects get banned within an hour or two after people report it if it’s inappropriate. But the current situation Scratch is in has spiraled out of control. Crackers and spammers create bot accounts that look for users they target and make inappropriate remixes of their projects that no one should ever have to see, especially Scratch’s younger users. The accounts these crackers/spammers create either pretend to be a certain scratcher to frame them or use cracked accounts, which makes the original user who got cracked look bad (again, framing). A well known example of this happened to @fernpool, who was a very popular scratcher who made Warriors fan games. A cracker who calls himself “Revv” got her account banned. Also, a well known cracker and spammer “veryrealteacher”’s original account was banned by ST, but many of the inappropriate remixes you see were created by their bot accounts. This has caused the Scratch community to feel less safe and more outraged. Some users are taking a break from Scratch until the situation blows over, or even unsharing their projects so that they don’t get remixed. Some are trying to take action and/or spread awareness. Many criticize ST for punishing those who speak up about the situation. But one thing’s for sure- the bots and crackers need to be stopped. The best thing we all can do is to stay safe and use a strong, complicated password to make sure we don’t get cracked. Music from Minecraft. I normally use Procreate, but I’m grounded, so the thumbnail was made in Autodesk Sketchbook on my school device. Sorry it’s a bit lazy. Btw, to clear up confusion, “crackers” is not a typo. It is a term similar to “hackers”, but cracking account is different from hacking. When you think of “hackers”, you think of someone who uses computers to gain private information, which is usually more private than just Scratch passwords. They often use this information to steal. “Crackers” are people who use some kind of password guessing software to get into accounts. So, crackers would be a better term for these people who take over Scratch accounts.
Update 9/27: I just made a part 2, it’s a bit better. I also used a text engine, so skip this if you don’t like reading and go here instead: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1222211040/ This rant was more for awareness purposes. Part 2 is more about my thoughts.
