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The Scratch Website is the official website for Scratch, in which users can upload and view projects, as well as communicate with others through comments on profiles, studios, projects, and posts on the Scratch Forums. The URL of the Scratch website is https://scratch.mit.edu/.
The Scratch Website is extremely customizable; other users can be followed, studios can be created, and projects can be deleted. Other users' profiles can be viewed as well.
The site houses the Scratch Community; every user has their own profile page. It also hosts the Recently Shared Projects, the What the Community is Loving, Featured Projects, What the Community is Remixing, and the Projects by Scratchers I'm Following (if the logged-in user is following others), and more sections.
Sections
Below is a list of all main sections of the Scratch Website:
- Scratch Program
- Front Page (the website's homepage)
- Profile Page
- My Stuff editor
- Shared projects
- Studios
- Scratch Forums
- Explore projects and studios
- Help areas
- Scratch Wiki
- Translating site
History
The early Scratch Website was much smaller, as it housed a smaller community. Example differences are that the Front page contained far fewer rows, the forums were smaller, and pages were fairly different.
Early Days and Beta
When Scratch was first announced to the public they started with small blog. After a while, for the picked testers, they opened a page on the blog where Scratch projects could be shown and played by the public. Once Scratch was released to the public, hundreds of Scratchers starting making projects and wanting to post them to the Scratch blog. The Scratch Team then decided to extend the blog into a full website so everyone could post their projects and give feedback to one another. When Scratch was first made it did not have a website as developed as the current one. It was just a single web page introducing Scratch and giving some links to "Scratch Cards" and "Tutorials". Over time, the creators of Scratch created a community as they saw that one could be effectively created.[1]
The beta version of the Scratch Website can be found here.
Structure
The structure of the website has changed over time. New features such as Scratch Design Studios were introduced, along with entirely new areas such as the Text-based Games Forum. There has been renovation as well; such as an entire change to the Front Page (also allowing a row specifically for curators) or forum changes (archiving, creation).
In May 2013, the entire Scratch website was updated to Scratch 2.0. The site underwent many changes, including a new project editor online with many new features, such as procedures and cloning; an updated look; new features on the site, such as Explore, My Stuff, and Related Projects; an updated Front Page; and fresh forums (the old ones were archived).
Growth
The site has grown largely over time. It has reached a count of over seven million projects, and a count of over four and a half million Scratchers. All areas of the site are growing, and will most likely continue to do so; the site is showing no signs of slowing down.
European Server
On the 27th of July, 2010,[2] a separate version of the site was created for users outside of the US. This was exactly the same website, the only difference was that the caching engine was hosted in a server in Europe, with the hope that this would increase the speed of the connection for users outside the US. However, this was only a test of the system and many users experienced difficulties with the system, therefore the site was abandoned and no longer exists.
Errors
- See also: Maintenance Mode
Sometimes 403, 404, or 500 errors appear throughout the website. 403 errors appear when a person tries to view a page without permission. 404 errors are thrown when a page on Scratch does not exist, and 500 errors are thrown when the Scratch server had an error. Also, if the Scratch Team is making major changes to the website, Scratchers will be redirected to the Maintenance Mode until the maintenance is over.
There are also some other errors some users get such as the 504 "Gateway Timeout" error.[3] However, they only return a basic text screen instead of a decorative message.
Website Demographics
Alexa shows that the mit.edu domain is ranked 1,224 in the world for website traffic, although this also includes the main MIT site. Alexa also shows that it is ranked 860 in the US, and that there are 123,717 websites linking into it. 11.84% of visitors to the main MIT site visited the scratch.mit.edu subdomain.[4] The highest number of visits in a day to the Scratch Website was 59,814, on October 8, 2009 according to Quantcast statistics. The highest number of visits in a month was over 1,200,000.[5]
