Community Guidelines for Hopscotch Forum

Frequently Asked Questions
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Hopscotch Forum Community Guidelines

Welcome, Hopscotchers!

This forum is here to help you improve your Hopscotch skills and share what you know to help others. Here are your guidelines to make this forum a place where everyone feels welcomed, supported, and encouraged. Follow the guidelines at all times.

If you have any questions about why a certain guideline exists, please feel free to ask here! If you have any questions/comments/concerns regarding the Leadership Team and Forum moderation, please use this topic.

Be Nice to Others

  • Practice good digital citizenship (some jokes aren’t as funny when they’re online!)
  • Be respectful with your words, and address others the way they want to be addressed
  • If you disagree with someone, disagree politely. Sharing your own beliefs doesn’t mean de-valuing other people’s beliefs.
  • Share and learn. Help out fellow Hopscotchers when they have questions. Seek help when you have questions. There’s always room to learn more!
  • Respect each other’s privacy. Don’t go into other people’s unlisted topics, and do not set your notifications to Watching or Tracking for the Collaborations & Beta Testing category. More details can be found here.
  • Treat everyone as an equal; no one should be left out or made to feel as if they’re not a valid member of the forum
  • Kindness entails inclusion! To make sure that everyone is able to understand each other and communicate effectively, all posts should be in standard written English.
    • You may use other languages as long as a clear, standard english translation is provided visibly in the same post.

Alternate Accounts

Online Safety

  • Keep Hopscotch a safe place. Don’t share personal information, and don’t ask others to share their personal information (through polls or direct requests)!
  • Conversations should stay on the forum. Do not share links for others to contact you outside of the forum.
    Things you can share
    • First name
    • Age
    • Hopscotch username
    • Links to the websites that contain useful information about coding and creative arts as long as they in no way contain content that we don’t allow. They may also not promote anything that is not allowed, and the Leadership Team maintains the right to remove any links posted that violate this.
    • Hopscotch-related GitHub and GitLab links
    • Links to your YouTube channel

      Important: if any profiles associated with the links you post contain personal information that’s not allowed, it will be removed. This includes YouTube channels and personal websites that are not on GitHub or aren’t Hopscotch-related.

    Things you cannot share
    • Your last name
    • Any emails without an @gethopscotch.com domain (THT emails)
    • Phone numbers
    • Where you live
    • Your school
    • Social media info
    • Usernames for other platforms
    • Personal pictures (any original pictures that you or someone close to you has taken)
      • Photos of yourself
      • Photos of your friends and family members.
      • Photos of your house or street
      • Photos of your school
      • Photos of any other location that can give away where you are. This also includes photos of your letters, messages, and phone screens.

Keep the discussion clean!

  • Don’t post something you wouldn’t want your grandma to see
  • Flag inappropriate or harmful content, and it will be removed. Please do not reply to it.
  • Keep it relevant! Add to the conversation by responding directly to the question posted in the topic, or reply as a linked topic to lead the conversation in a slightly different direction.
    • Each topic serves a purpose! Make sure that your discussion is always productive and not posting for the sake of posting.
    • Topics should not be spammed towards closing time
  • All unapproved non-code related topics will be archived.

User Activity

  • Do not make speculations about other users. These accusations are hurtful and only lead to more off-topic discussion. Examples include (but are not limited to):
    • Whether someone self-planted
    • Whether someone is stealing code
    • Why someone has been suspended

If you have any concerns about a particular user, email THT directly at hello@gethopscotch.com

Seeds, Plants, Likes, and Follows

  • You may only request for plants, seeds, followers, and likes in:
    1. The Official Seeds/Plants/Likes Request Topic, up to once a day and no more than 3 times a week
    2. A Hopscotcher-started competition/event topic that involves a prize, given that the host is okay with you asking for plants related to that event.
  • When creating a competition or event that involves seeds, you must keep the disclaimer that is generated when you create the topic.
    • Replace the (@ yourself) with @your-username, but leave it unmodified otherwise.
  • If you are requesting seeds in a shop, you must be providing a project, service, or commission that cannot be undone.
    • This means you cannot sell likes and follows for seeds on the app, as those are hard to track and easy to undo.

Your Original Artwork, Designs, and Videos

Original Artwork & Designs

  • All original artwork and sketch-ups must be posted in the Drawing with Hopscotch Topic. To post your art in other topics, please include a link to your post instead of posting it on its own.
    Exceptions can be made for original creations associated with unlisted topics

Hopscotch YouTube Videos

  • If you’d like to share a YouTube video about Hopscotch, you must post the link in this topic. Make sure that both the channel and video only has Hopscotch-related content and does not reveal personal information.
    • Using your voice in videos is allowed, but no face reveals please :)
    • To create a second YouTube channel with the same email as your main channel, just search for 2 youtube channels 1 account
    • The rule of posting in this topic is mainly for YouTube channels and videos, because a YouTube channel could have videos that are not Hopscotch-related. Recordings of Hopscotch projects on Catbox are standalone, so you can post them in YCTAHH, Bugs with Hopscotch, Project Updates or Debug my Code as you need.
  • If it’s your content, your channel should not contain personal information or inappropriate content, your videos must be about hopscotch, and your comments should be turned off. Make sure to post your hopscotch videos in Videos Created by Hops.

Non-Hopscotch YouTube Videos

  • For non-educational, non-Hopscotch-related videos, they must be under 15 minutes for the sake of moderation. (This limit does not apply to Hopscotch-related videos!)
  • The creator must be decently popular, and the video must not contain inappropriate content.

Warnings and Suspensions

If you break a guideline on the forum, leaders and moderators might decide to hand out either a reminder or a warning.

Receiving Reminders vs Warnings
  • A reminder does not count towards a possible silencing or suspension and is sent out only to remind you about our guidelines. If you do not improve from a reminder and continue breaking the guidelines, we may send you a warning.
  • A warning is more severe: it might count towards a possible silencing or suspension.
Silencings and Suspensions

After receiving multiple community warnings, you may receive a silencing if you:

  1. Repeatedly engage in breaking community guidelines over the course of a few days, or every time they visit the forum over the course of a few weeks
  • e.g. have made posts which are disruptive / inappropriate
  1. Have no history of repeated problematic behaviour; or only a few minor incidents
  2. And it seems that a break from the forum would be a good reset to reconsider their behavior

And you may receive a suspension if you:

  1. Break community guidelines / making many posts within a short timeframe (e.g. 5+ posts in a few hours, or a lot within 24-48 hours) which
  • contain clearly inappropriate content (e.g. 18+ references, personal insults)
  • are clearly disruptive to the community (many people making replies to the inappropriate posts which derails discussions, or many people are flagging)
  1. And/or have a past history of problematic behavior
  2. Not responsive to warnings / Clearly not willing to reconsider behavior
Trust Level Locking

The most common consequence of multiple warnings is Trust Level locking[4]. If we have subsequently sent reminders/warnings but see no comparable change in behavior, this may occur.

Trust levels are based on trust, and are a privilege. Disrespect of the community and breaking guidelines intended to maintain a safe space is also breaking trust, and additional privileges will only be granted once the trust earned back.[5]

Consciously improving behavior will result in us removing this lock, so don’t get discouraged! All of these actions taken are to help us help you while maintaining the community’s integrity.

Username Changes

  • You may change your forum username at any time, as long as you haven’t changed it for at least a year prior.[6]
  • The change may be requested in the Leaders Q and A topic and will be approved as long as you meet these requirements.

This post was modified from the original post, with the help of forum leaders.

  1. Assets imported to your game, i.e. drawings of characters ↩︎

  2. Designs such as sketch-ups of game menus
    Does not include imported assets ↩︎

  3. Sketches of basic gameplay such as room layouts ↩︎

  4. the act of setting a lock on the user’s profile so that cannot automatically advance in trust level ↩︎

  5. After one year, without any additional community warnings, you will be able to get your trust level unlocked and work your way up again. ↩︎

  6. Also keep in mind that usernames cannot contain special characters, need to be at least 3 characters long, and must to be unique. ↩︎

98 Likes
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New community guidelines? Cool

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Yeah! Nice to see that the new guidelines are finally out :))

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I think most of them are the same

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They’re mostly the same, just reworked a bit and some importantly points have been added :)) it’s nice to see those being reiterated and incorporated into the main ones

28 Likes
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New guidelines? Very cool!

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Are you allowed to state which country/region you live in, or your time zone?

Like, could I say that I might live in the U. S. A, but don’t say which state, city, or town I live in?

19 Likes
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Timezone or countries are okay!

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(tho I wouldn’t necessarily recommend sharing country if it’s somewhere like the Vatican or is really small/easily identifiable (like maybe the equivalent of a populous US state). just saying cuz I think that’s a point that’s been brought up before)

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Are we allowed to share our GitHub, if we have one?

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Also someone should maybe unpin the old guidelines topic?

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yep

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GitHub is fine, as elaborated on here:

14 Likes
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Sorry, I have a lot of questions… but:

Why are alt accounts not allowed on the forum? It’s not really elaborated on the list, so I’m a little confused.

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Alternative accounts are not allowed so that we can prevent spam in the forum. There are also not a lot of reasons why one would ever need an alt account. If everyone starts making lots of accounts, we might have too many duplicate contents on the forum. This is so that the forum can stay clean and moderated.

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Cool new community guidelines!

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Im worried for petrichor and awesome e

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Certain alt accounts were approved by Ana for testing or other reasons, however those are special circumstances and not the norm. Pretty sure that’s the case for them.

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Yep, like how @FlamePhoenix is my alt acc, used for whenever something needs testing

Petrichor and E aren’t alt accs tho, they’re two different people which is fine. Alt thing is just a running joke

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