Scratch Website

This article is about the whole website system. For the front page, see Front Page.

*This article or section documents the current version of Scratch (version 3.0). For this article in Scratch 2.0, see Scratch Website#Scratch 2.0. For this article in Scratch 1.4, see Scratch Website (1.4).*
The **Scratch Website** is the official website of Scratch. On it, Scratchers can upload and view projects with the Online Editor, as well as communicate with others through comments on profiles, studios, projects, and posts on the Discussion Forums. The URL of the Scratch website is scratch.mit.edu.

The Scratch Website is customizable; other users can be followed, studios can be created, projects and studios can be deleted. Other user’s profiles can be viewed as well.

The site houses the Scratch Community; every user has their own profile page. The front page hosts the Featured Projects, Featured Studios, Projects by Scratchers I'm Following (if the logged-in user is following others), What the Community is Remixing, and What the Community is Loving, and more sections.

## Sections

Below is a list of all main sections of the Scratch Website:

* Online Editor
* Front Page (the website's homepage)
* Profile Page
* My Stuff editor
* Shared projects
* Project Pages
* Studios
* Scratch Forums
* Explore projects and studios
* Help areas
* Translating site
* Log-in as shown to the right
* About page

The order of the rows on the front page is as follows:

* Featured Projects
* Featured Studios
* Projects Curated by () (currently unavailable due to maintenance work)
* Scratch Design Studio Row
* Projects Loved by Scratchers I'm Following
* What the Community is Loving
* What the Community is Remixing

## History

Main article: Scratch Website (1.4)

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 a 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 posted 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.

The beta version of the Scratch Website can be found here.

### Scratch 2.0

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 (now discontinued on the Scratch Website).
There have also been renovations 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).

#### European Server

On the 27th of July, 2010, a separate version of the site was created for users outside of the US. This was 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.

### Scratch 3.0

For Scratch 3.0, the website was updated and redesigned again. There is now a banner across the top of the front page. Project pages and many other information pages were updated to the new design, but many other pages, such as profile pages, still have the old design. On July 6, 2021, the studios were updated.

### Growth

The Scratch website has grown over time. There are now over 127 million projects shared and over 106 million Scratchers as of March 28, 2023.

## Errors

See also: 403 Error, 404 Error, and 500 Error
Sometimes 403, 404, or 500 errors appear throughout the website. 403 errors appear when somebody 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. If the Scratch Team is making major changes to the website, visitors will be redirected to the Maintenance Mode until the maintenance is over.

### Minor Errors

There are also some other errors some users get such as the 504 "Gateway Timeout" error. However, they only return a basic text screen instead of a decorative message.

The 405 Method Not Allowed error also exists. It can be visited here, although it gives a browser error and there is no decorative message for that.

### Maintenance Mode

*See also Maintenance Mode*

Sometimes the Scratch Website is being fixed or edited by the Scratch Team, and can display multiple different errors.

It used to throw a link of Scratch's Twitter page, where a former Scratch Team member (often @speakvisually) would give a warning and reason of why the site was down.

## Website Demographics

Template:Update
Amazon shows that the mit.edu domain is ranked 1,224 in the world for website traffic, although this also includes the main MIT site. Amazon also shows that it is ranked 860 in the United States and that 123,717 websites are linking into it. 11.84% of visitors to the main MIT site visited the scratch.mit.edu subdomain. 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.

## Copies

There exist copies and clones of the Scratch website that are not hosted by the Scratch Team. They often have much the same behavior, but they should be avoided since they are not the official Scratch site.

An easy way to check whether a site is a clone is in the address bar of the browser: if it is the official Scratch website, the URL will start with `scratch.mit.edu`. Otherwise, leave immediately.

## External Links

* The earliest version of the website
* The front page during Scratch 2.0 on May 10, 2013

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 https://web.archive.org/web/20061116125316/http://scratch.mit.edu:80/
2. ↑ ar-topic:41680
3. ↑ scratch:statistics
4. ↑ topic:104038
5. ↑ post:902226
6. ↑ http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mit.edu [*dead link*]
7. ↑ http://www.quantcast.com/scratch.mit.edu [*dead link*]

ru:Сайт Скретч
id:Situs Scratch
nl:Scratch website
ja:Scratchウェブサイト
de:Scratch Frontpage