Eng:Sixty-Second Rule

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The message given to users who try to post more than once in a minute.

The sixty-second rule is a limitation on the Scratch Forums that prevents Scratchers from posting more than once per minute. The technical term for this rule is "flood control".

Reasoning

The sixty-second rule exists to prevent spammers from quickly filling the forums with spam. While the rule does not stop them completely, it greatly decreases the amount of spam posts, giving the Community Moderators and the Scratch Team more time to deal with any problems before they grow too large.

Problems

Many users complain about the sixty-second rule, but because of its necessity, it will most likely never be changed. Some users even create accounts or projects to protest against the rule.

Despite possible variations of the rule, the chances of it being completely disabled is highly unlikely.

There was a poll sticky thread in January 2011 created in the Text Based Games Forums about rewarding friendly Scratchers with a reduce to the sixty-second rule, but many users disagreed because it would create high arguments and competition. The thread, as well as the TBG forums, are now closed. The suggestion has currently not been accepted, but the sixty-second rule will never be removed.

120-second rule

See also: New Scratcher Status

New Scratchers have the 120-second (2 minutes) rule instead of the sixty-second rule. The reason was to try and stop a wave of spammers — after a large amount of spam, the rule was put into place as an effort to combat the spammers. While it helps tremendously to combat the spammers, it can be irritating for peaceful new users. There was previously a 1000-second (16 minutes and 40 seconds) rule — however, it was decreased to 600 (10 minutes) seconds, 360 (6 minutes) seconds, and then 180 (3 minutes) seconds on July 3, 2011. Later, on the release of Scratch 2.0, it was changed to 120 seconds. Then, after the Hour of Code event, during which the Scratch Forums became more vulnerable to spambots, the rule returned to 600 seconds. After the event, it was changed back to 120 seconds.^{[citation needed]}

Exceptions

Members of the Scratch Team have the sixty-second rule disabled for them. This is because they are trusted members of the community, and also so they can deal with trouble and clean up spam faster.

Community Moderators and Retired Community Moderators also had the sixty-second rule disabled.