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Wahsp wrote:

Guide to Finding Any Duplicates to Your Suggestion

You've had an amazing idea, one that you're sure will revolutionize Scratch. So you head to the Suggestions Forum and type out your suggestion and all the reasons it's wonderful. Soon after you post your topic though, you discover someone else had your idea and you wasted a lot of time.
So, before you suggest, be sure you check for any topics out there that might be the same as yours.


What can you do to figure out if your topic is a duplicate of another?

The first step would be to come up with some key words related to your idea. Let's say our suggestion is to make the Scratch Cat purple instead of orange. Some words you might want to use would be Scratch Cat, or Change Color or a combination of words (for this I used “Scratch Cat Change”. It's not too specific, but helped narrow my results a bit)

Next is the searching part. There are two ways to do this (of the two, I'd recommend the second one).

• Paste this in your search bar: site: scratch.mit.edu/discuss/ and wait for the next step
  

or

• Go here, to this custom search by @customhacker, this search @plit234 showed me, or use this search recommended by @VideoGamerCanInvent
  

Once you have pasted or pulled up the other page, either place your key words after the /
or if you're using the custom search, search your words.

Now you are able to look for duplicates. Even if your first try doesn't show anything, try mixing up the words just to be safe, especially if the results are not close to your topic. The example words I used didn't give me anything related until I used “Scratch Cat Change”. A suggestion to change the Scratch Cat to a fish appeared. From all of my searches, I can conclude that there probably is not a topic about changing the color of Scratch Cat, and therefore my suggestion is most likely not a duplicate.

Be careful when looking for duplicates, a topic might seem similar or have a similar title, but that does not mean your topic is a duplicate. It's always a good idea to read through the post to make sure.

What do you do if you do find a duplicate?

Well if you haven't posted your suggestion, don't post it now. If you find a duplicate of your topic after you've already posted it though, you should close your topic yourself or request an admin to close it so the discussion is in one place. Then you can go to the other topic and add to the conversation there. Maybe you thought of something that really improved the suggestion or you want to show you support or agree with it. If you find a duplicate of another user's topic, politely inform them of it and provide them with a link.

And if no duplicates are found?

If you've checked and there aren't any similar ideas around, then go ahead and post your suggestion!

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Thanks for reading! If you have any suggestions for this guide (hah), please give them below. If I made any sort of error, please inform me of that as well (it is one in the morning as I post this). I hope this guide helps some users with their own suggestions, or to help them help others with theirs.

oh and I checked and I'm pretty sure this is not a duplicate

R4356th wrote:

Thank you so much!

kChiaEC19 wrote:

We haven't seen a post from this sticky since December, and I wish stickies just continue having creating forever and ever continuous posts.

nerdiebirdy wrote:

What do you do when your search is not working?

bfbfan55 wrote:

But sometimes, the duplicate is a topic where nothing has been posted in like a year.

Wahsp wrote:

smartzx wrote:

Great, but I think that everyone is too lazy to use this technique unless everyone sees this post, it won't help.

I guess being stickied might help, but you're right