Eng:Spam

Spam is something that is against the Community Guidelines. Examples include making duplicate forum topics, advertising oneself on others' projects, posting nonsense or gibberish, typing random keys on the keyboard or posting off-topic.

Repeated spamming leads to alerts or even a ban. It is also highly discouraged among the Scratch Community.

Types of Spam
Spam can occur almost anywhere in the Scratch Website. Wherever it is, it should be reported.

Comments and Forum Posts
Spam comments or posts are irrelevant, nonsensical, or completely off-topic. Advertising your projects in comments or unrelated topics is also considered to be spam. A lot of spam has been controlled by the "similar message" and Sixty-Second Rule features. Prior to the 500 character limit, some people used to spam by posting large texts and entire Wikipedia articles. In the forums, posting several duplicate topics is also considered spam.

Often newer users will post advertisements to their projects on more popular projects.

The trend of replying "low" on the first comment of a project is an interesting type of spam that has developed. These are often replied to with comments like "lower", which are replied to with "lowest". The goal is generally to get the lowest comment on the page, and usually develops on popular projects.

Blockspam
Blockspam is a type of forum spam in the form of nonsense scripts made with the Block Plugin such as saying a message with look blocks, doing an action with made up blocks, and making giant blocks.

The Help With Scripts forum has a topic specifically for experimenting with the block plugin, but those who spam elsewhere should be reported.

The old [blocks][/blocks] tags were also used to make blockspam.

Linkspam
Linkspam is a form of spam that consists of links and images. Commercial spam is considered linkspam. Harmful links and images, including unrelated images, are also linkspam. To help prevent this, New Scratchers cannot post external links or images.

ASCII Art
ASCII Art is the arrangement of text to look like a recognizable image. Often when posted, users will copy and paste it and post it themselves, which severely lengthens the web page and can be annoying to read through.

Some popular images are a thumbs-up, rage faces, skull, nyan cat, the Illuminati triangle, and the popular "Doge" meme.

'Chain letter' Spam
Another type of spam is a comment telling the user to copy and paste it on other projects and then something good will happen such as romantic situations and good luck. If the user refuses to copy and paste (called "breaking the chain"), something bad will happen such as bad luck and even death. There's sometimes a backstory added to prove the claim and force the user to carry on the chain. It should always be reported since not only it's spam, it's also threatening.

Emoticon Spam
Emoticon spam, also known as 'smiley spam', is a type of spam which uses emoticons for no good reason. This also includes posting a big amount of emoticons (called "smiley wall") which can lag computers.

Tags
The tag "Waffles" was a particularly popular spam tag, which was posted on thousands of projects. Other popular spam tags were "username was here" and obvious descriptions like "project" or "made by username". The text "[+]" was often spammed in the form of "click [+] if you like something". Similarly, the "Click =>" tag told the reader to click the plus one link to its right. Tags with rude language were also considered spam. Spam tags could be flagged with the flag button next to them.

Since users lost the ability to tag projects other than their own in Scratch 2.0, tag spam is no longer a major issue.

Project Spam
A spam project is easy to spot. They are projects with no exact purpose, containing either gibberish or nothing at all. Inappropriate projects are also counted as spam.

Commercial Spam
Commercial Spam is spam aimed at advertising websites or products. They are common in the New Scratchers forum in a form like this: "Hi! I'm [...] and I work in the [...] industry! Check out this website! [...]."

Another example of commercial spam would be "Good info. [spam link]"

It is commercial spam because it does not contribute anything to the forum topic, and it has a spam link to a commercial site. Commercial spam can also be found posted on random topics or projects.

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is another form of commercial spam, which aims at making search engines such as Google display posts which link to commercial websites, etc. Search engines prefer ".edu" domains like "scratch.mit.edu", thus SEO takes place a lot on Scratch. Due to the New Scratcher status on the forums, most commercial spammers cannot post clickable links there to external sites, so most search engines will ignore them. In comments, URLs are also not transformed to hyperlinks.

Spammers
A spammer is a user who spams constantly. They are usually created by people who are willing to misuse the site for spamming and advertising. Even though there are human spammers, there are also spambots (see section below). Spammers can risk getting banned.

Spambots
Spambots are programs written by spammers to create accounts for the purpose of spamming on websites automatically. Spambots are slowed down by certain features implemented to help stop them, such as slower posting times (for comments and forums posts) for New Scratchers, email account confirmation to stop spambots from posting spam projects, and IP bans to try to prevent future spambots from the same source from being created.