Hey all! Seems like this announcement was really confusing for various reasons, so based on the feedback from the first readers, I've rewritten it and posted it in a new thread:

http://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/17590/

Leaving this one up just for history's sake.

Thanks to those who posted, and helped clarify the confusion.

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After much deliberation, we've decided to end the community moderators program. It's been a great run - with lots of helpful contributions from everyone who has participated. We're working on a new program that will allow Scratchers to contribute to the community in lots of different ways. We’ll provide more details in a future post.

Sparks and Harakou will be remaining as active CMs for a while longer while we figure out the next program. After years of great contributions, JSO, myredneptune, coolstuff, Lucario621, and Scimonster are retiring. nXII, who joined the community moderators after giving us tons of help preparing these forums for Scratch 2.0, is also retiring. We're super grateful for all their contributions! If you haven't thanked them lately, now's a great time to say so in a comment on their profile, or in a post on this thread!

So thanks to all the community moderators for giving so much to the Scratch community in so many different ways!

Scratch On!
Amos
on behalf of the Scratch Team

lisafireball wrote:

NO!!!! *Pulls hair and screams* WHY. WHY?!?!?THIS IS MADNESS!! MADNESS I TELL U!!!! DX

Haha, woah, relax there.Take a deep breath, it will be alright.

Lightnin wrote:

lisafireball wrote:

NO!!!! *Pulls hair and screams* WHY. WHY?!?!?THIS IS MADNESS!! MADNESS I TELL U!!!! DX

Haha, woah, relax there.Take a deep breath, it will be alright.

Ok…. Why are you removing them?

Why end it? Is there a specific reason?

lisafireball wrote:

Ok…. Why are you removing them?

We decided to retire the community moderators program because we want to create a new role with a different focus – less on moderation, and more on helping Scratchers make awesome stuff (both with “Scratch the programming tool” and in “Scratch the community”). As some have already seen from the discussion forum pull down menus, part of the program will be called “Scratch Mentors.” We're working on co-creating it with the first cohort of Scratch mentors now. Part of their role will be focused on supporting other ways for Scratchers to contribute to the community (i.e. helping Scratchers get un-stuck when working on challenging projects, or helping maintain and improve Scratch design studios, for example. )

Becoming a community moderator was a way for a few Scratchers to contribute to Scratch and the Scratch community. Soon there will be many more ways for Scratchers to help out - which is something that Scratchers have told us they want for a very long time.

Does that answer your question / concern lisafireball?

cobraguy wrote:

Why end it? Is there a specific reason?

See above for part of the answer. But I'll also say that the name of “moderators” was always a problem. When starting off, new CMs would often be focused on moderation and powers – like “Let me at those trolls!”. We would have to explain a lot that the emphasis was not really on moderation - it's more about helping Scratchers in many different ways, advising the ST, and setting a friendly tone that's *super* important for the Scratch community.

So as we realized that we had to do a lot of work to explain that “it's not all about moderation”, it became clear that we probably should solve that problem by changing the name.This is sometimes how things evolve in big projects.

p.s. Hope the above post helps clarify things! @cobraguy and others - if you think that it helps clarify things, let me know, and maybe I'll add some of that info into the first post.

Lightnin wrote:

lisafireball wrote:

Ok…. Why are you removing them?

We decided to retire the community moderators program because we want to create a new role with a different focus – less on moderation, and more on helping Scratchers make awesome stuff (both with “Scratch the programming tool” and in “Scratch the community”). As some have already seen from the discussion forum pull down menus, part of the program will be called “Scratch Mentors.” We're working on co-creating it with the first cohort of Scratch mentors now. Part of their role will be focused on supporting other ways for Scratchers to contribute to the community (i.e. helping Scratchers get un-stuck when working on challenging projects, or helping maintain and improve Scratch design studios, for example. )

Becoming a community moderator was a way for a few Scratchers to contribute to Scratch and the Scratch community. Soon there will be many more ways for Scratchers to help out - which is something that Scratchers have told us they want for a very long time.

Does that answer your question / concern lisafireball?

Well it answers my questions. My concern is that sometimes I'm talking about things on Scratch and I don't always know if what I'm talking about is always all-age appropriate. So a moderator comes in and tells me that it is not ok to talk about those things on Scratch. And that really helps me to know that I need to tone down on the content. I know that there is a report button for other users, but that never explains why was it bad, which I need to know. So that is why I kind of freaked out when I saw that you were removing them. Also, moderators can see and take off bad projects before we (scratchers) can see them. Please reply. Thank you.

I get where you're coming from on this, and it seems like a good idea, but that leaves Cheddargirl and Paddle2See doing all the clean up work on the forums doesn't it? Could you please explain what the plan is there?

lisafireball wrote:

Lightnin wrote:

Does that answer your question / concern lisafireball?

Well it answers my questions. My concern is that sometimes I'm talking about things on Scratch and I don't always know if what I'm talking about is always all-age appropriate. So a moderator comes in and tells me that it is not ok to talk about those things on Scratch. And that really helps me to know that I need to tone down on the content. I know that there is a report button for other users, but that never explains why was it bad, which I need to know. So that is why I kind of freaked out when I saw that you were removing them. Also, moderators can see and take off bad projects before we (scratchers) can see them. Please reply. Thank you.

You are welcome! I think I see what's confusing here.Scratch still has - and will continue to have - a team of website moderators, who review and comment on projects, and remove them if necessary. We'll call them “Scratch website moderators.” They don't tend to be as active in the forums - maybe with the exception of Cheddargirl, who does both. But there's also @scmb1, and @freddog. They're still gonna be working.

The community moderators were volunteer Scratchers who were mainly focused on contributing in the forums. We'll still have people moderating the forums, and answering questions, and clarifying what is or isn't ok.

Lightnin wrote:

lisafireball wrote:

Lightnin wrote:

Does that answer your question / concern lisafireball?

Well it answers my questions. My concern is that sometimes I'm talking about things on Scratch and I don't always know if what I'm talking about is always all-age appropriate. So a moderator comes in and tells me that it is not ok to talk about those things on Scratch. And that really helps me to know that I need to tone down on the content. I know that there is a report button for other users, but that never explains why was it bad, which I need to know. So that is why I kind of freaked out when I saw that you were removing them. Also, moderators can see and take off bad projects before we (scratchers) can see them. Please reply. Thank you.

You are welcome! I think I see what's confusing here.Scratch still has - and will continue to have - a team of website moderators, who review and comment on projects, and remove them if necessary. We'll call them “Scratch website moderators.” They don't tend to be as active in the forums - maybe with the exception of Cheddargirl, who does both. But there's also @scmb1, and @freddog. They're still gonna be working.

The community moderators were volunteer Scratchers who were mainly focused on contributing in the forums. We'll still have people moderating the forums, and answering questions, and clarifying what is or isn't ok.

Thanks!!! Now I can role-play without worry!

Great! I'm going to repost based on the feedback in this thread. Thanks everyone!

You can find the new thread here: http://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/17590/

lisafireball wrote:

Lightnin wrote:

lisafireball wrote:

Ok…. Why are you removing them?

We decided to retire the community moderators program because we want to create a new role with a different focus – less on moderation, and more on helping Scratchers make awesome stuff (both with “Scratch the programming tool” and in “Scratch the community”). As some have already seen from the discussion forum pull down menus, part of the program will be called “Scratch Mentors.” We're working on co-creating it with the first cohort of Scratch mentors now. Part of their role will be focused on supporting other ways for Scratchers to contribute to the community (i.e. helping Scratchers get un-stuck when working on challenging projects, or helping maintain and improve Scratch design studios, for example. )

Becoming a community moderator was a way for a few Scratchers to contribute to Scratch and the Scratch community. Soon there will be many more ways for Scratchers to help out - which is something that Scratchers have told us they want for a very long time.

Does that answer your question / concern lisafireball?

Well it answers my questions. My concern is that sometimes I'm talking about things on Scratch and I don't always know if what I'm talking about is always all-age appropriate. So a moderator comes in and tells me that it is not ok to talk about those things on Scratch. And that really helps me to know that I need to tone down on the content. I know that there is a report button for other users, but that never explains why was it bad, which I need to know. So that is why I kind of freaked out when I saw that you were removing them. Also, moderators can see and take off bad projects before we (scratchers) can see them. Please reply. Thank you.

I think that Scratch Mentors would also be able to tell you when something is Scratch-appropriate or not. Really, it just takes a good understanding of the Community Guidelines, and some intuition.
And, contrary to popular belief, CMs did not moderate the main site…