#for backend

[wip]

A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?

Answer: Hello @circumference-pie!

Buckle up y’all, it’s story time again!

First: nobody who works at Tumblr right now was a part of the work of planning the default queue implementation, which was more than ten years ago. So the full story behind “Why does it work that way?” has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. All we can do is tell you how it works today and surmise some reasons why. The queue is actually a very clever system and part of how it works explains some of why it works the way it does. Also, there have been attempts to do what you ask—we still have “Queue 2.0” available in your Tumblr Labs settings, which tries to get closer to how you expect things to work.

Anyway! How the queue works today is not actually a queue in the traditional sense. There is no single list of posts that are in “your queue”. Instead, when you “Add to queue” after creating a post, we’re actually scheduling it to post at a future time, as if you had used the “Schedule post” option instead. We’re just calculating that time on your behalf when you use “Add to queue”, based on your settings, and how many other scheduled posts you have already. We use a secondary “index” model, called “ScheduledPost”, to keep track of posts you have scheduled on your blog. We do mark the ones that are a part of “your queue”, but the data model doesn’t keep one list of your “queue” per se.

You can see this in action on your blog, hiding in plain sight. If you add a bunch of posts to your queue, and then schedule a post for a specific future date, you’ll see both in your blog’s “queue” list, side by side. Because technically to us, they’re the same thing: queued posts are really just another kind of scheduled post, relying on the same always-running service to publish scheduled posts across all of Tumblr. Here’s a fun fact: we typically have about ~14.5 million future posts to publish from this list at any given time and are publishing hundreds of these scheduled posts every second.

So when you’re adding a new post to your queue, what we’re doing behind the scenes is starting at the beginning of your “day”, and creating time slots based on your queue settings. If a time slot is already filled, we move on to the next one. That’s why the default queue scheduler works how you describe—we’re trying to fill those “slots” based on the start of the day, rather than trying to divide the calendar day evenly. This just makes it much simpler for us to understand, scale, and predict when our “peaks” will be. At peak times, the publish-scheduled-posts service is publishing tens of thousands of posts in a manner of seconds. We did rewrite that post-publishing part of this architecture a few years ago to improve its efficiency and solve a lot of “lost post” bugs, but we didn’t change how “Add to queue” works.

However, the Queue 2.0 project available in Labs was an attempt to change the queue system to work as you expect—instead of starting at [beginning of day] and creating enough slots to fit [number of slots] every [number of hours], it tries to divide the calendar day into [number of slots] and fit the result back to the original algorithm’s mapping of the day. We never productionized this alternative approach, because it has a few bugs that some blogs hit in extreme cases, and we’ve never had time to fully fix them. It also can cause a bit of weirdness when time zones diverge, like with daylight savings time. Also, a lot of people prefer the default algorithm, and we haven’t thought of a nice way to transition everyone from one to the other. So for now, both options exist, and you can choose which algorithm for queue-slot-generating you want to use. We hope that makes sense! 

While complicated, it is a great example of a system built by engineers to make sense and be scalable and predictable. But sometimes these kinds of systems, while clever, aren’t very intuitive to understand without digging into how they work.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. 

[unpretty]

oh god what are they updating now

[computer-nerd-girl]

[unbfacts]

[foldingfittedsheets]

There’s this page where I’m supposed to get customer signatures at work and mine has been relentlessly not working for weeks. The signature box just never goes live. It’s not a huge deal since it’s just acknowledging our policies, but it’s still nicer to have when people get shouty.

I finally put in an IT ticket and got the response that the policies need to be scrolled all the way down to work. In frustration I tried several times to no avail. I had witnesses. Put in a fresh ticket.

The fucking thing worked first try. After months of this glitch. I was so furious and the IT guy was like yeah we get a lot of this same ticket. I paused and was like, okay, but can this be tablet specific because this isn’t the one I usually use. He was quiet and then admitted it might be.

So now I get to troubleshoot which tablets won’t take a damn signature and which will.

[lucentshore]

NO ITS NOT OUT YET but.

but.

steamdb my beloved friend has shown me that silksong was updated to be CONFIRMED compatible with windows, mac, and linux systems! this has not been reflected on the steam page yet as far as i can see

[saint-cecilias]

Okay, but it's TRULY the way this is very much giving Jon as King Beyond The Wall and Sansa as Queen In The North diplomatic ~relations~ & after-dark shenanigans. Blessed be.

[blank-house]

Hello!! Hope you’re doing well!! I noticed something that’s maybe funny that had me genuinely confused about your point system.

So, I’ve replayed keyframes a few times now, and I have a general idea of how each event will play out. I replayed it again recently and the first event I did was the study event where you can either go with Percy and Elio or Jamie, Deja, and Cameron. So, I talked to Jamie about his book, went to the coop with Percy and Elio, stayed behind to draw on the chalkboard with Percy, and succeeded the QTE with Elio.

And the funny thing is that after the event, I noticed that I had somehow gained enough points with all of the guys to get a phone call with any of them - it just depends on the randomizer.

And that’s where the confusion comes in because what do you mean they all like my MC enough to call them?! Percy is understandable, I guess, since I went to the coop like he wanted and stayed behind with him. But I talked to Jamie ONCE and that was enough to get a phone call?! And Elio?!? All I said to Elio was, “Hey, do you have anything else to give the coop?” and that was all he needed?!? I know that Elio is easy to befriend but that just seems like he needs to raise his standards!! /j

I am so confused. I am bewildered. Befuddled, even. How exactly does your point system work? This has only happened with one specific MC I play as and I need to know what I’m doing right with them since my other MCs struggle to make friends.

Anyways, this isn’t a complaint, I just thought it was funny and needed to air out my thoughts. I’m not expecting a reply since this wasn’t even a question. Your point system makes absolutely no sense to me but even that is really fun. You all made a great game and I’m excited to see what you come up with next!!

I assign points arbitrarily, purposefully and/or as fairly as possible! If it makes sense to me for the guys to like the MC for a choice, or a moment, or even a perspective then you get a point.

That way— it’s entirely possible to get a Jamie phone call even though he’s so difficult if you do everything “right” from the moment you met him :3

But lol at least you’re having fun with the mechanic.

[crow-caller]

I read a lot of YouTube comments, and I respond to a lot of them too. I don't know if this is... uncouth or whatever, but I do.

Sometimes, I get comments which are wrong. Sometimes they're abrasive. People who think trigger warnings are excessive, or that something I've called racist/ableist/antisemitic, Isn't. I do talk back to comments like this. And you know?

A Lot of the time, it works.

Most people who reply back consider what I say, and I've changed their minds. It's not that I'm some great writer, it's often that they are genuinely... confused.

A lot of people simply do not know Why trigger warnings matter, because their only context is mockery and extreme examples.

A lot of people don't know what institutional racism is. If you talk to people about things they don't understand, you won't have a scholarly debate— you'll have an argument where both sides thinks the other is an idiot. I had this recently.

I come at people with sympathy and then, gently, advise them. Do not talk to them like they're idiots or scum if you want to change anything. The above comment is saying "ableism isn't real", but what they unintentionally mean is "I don't know what ableism is so I don't think it's real." This is the case a lot of the time, because people's only context for what these terms mean is increasingly mockery, memes, and political ploys.

I was once a mod on the discord of a large gaming youtuber, a phenomenally half-toxic place— most regulars chill, most random lurkers posting the most atrocious memes and not getting why it was a problem. The head mod understood protecting lgbt+ people in the rules, but didn't Get nonbinary people — he was under the interpretation they were real, but the majority were attention seekers. He cited an account on tiktok, whose schtick was gathering and reacting to "blue hair pronouns" cringe. This was his only context beyond the moral instruction "our rules should protect lgbt+ people". He would have put that rule up either way, but only through discussing it did mods realize this was his opinion, and could explain why it was wrong.

I'm not advising everyone has to talk to everyone this way, I'm saying if you're going to engage, consider trying rather than venting.

[capseycartwright]

i’m so locked in on buddie canon right now for a second i forgot we’re living in a world where they’re trying to convince us bobby is dead (he’s not)

[wip]

Disabling likes.

Hey, folks! We’ve received numerous questions about disabling likes as a way of forcing people to reblog, so we thought we would put this answer together before WIP takes a short break over the holidays.

Unfortunately, we don’t think we would ever add an option to control likes in the same way we have the option to control reblogs and replies on normal Tumblr blogs. Likes serve an extremely important function as a way for us to understand how to recommend content to others—and it very much affects those algorithms that help power the For You feed, the “Because you liked…” recommendations, and how we sort posts in search results. People engaging with a post in any way—liking, reblogging, replying, Blazing, following—can help boost that post to people who haven’t seen it before.

However, we did make the conscious decision not to include likes in our new Communities feature and instead focus on comments. We may revisit that, but the idea with communities speaks to a need you’re talking about—the desire to have a known group of people who will appreciate your work, instead of throwing it out there to the void and hoping people see it.

We hope you try that out and see if it helps here! Thanks for your question.

[kirtini]

i gotta figure out vlookup in google sheets its gotta work the same right . i forgot how to do a vlookup tbh. fuck

[stjohnstarling]

I know it sounds too good to be true, and this is mostly me speculating, but my hope is that the remaining staff are following through on that plan to federate Tumblr so that when Automattic finally pulls the plug we'll be able to migrate our blogs to other hosts. Frankly I think that's the best case scenario for the end of life of any social media platform.

[bitchfitch]

Do y'all ever see a post that just like. Haunts you forever? And which consistently comes back up when you're trying to get to sleep

Anyways, if you do comms the whole "2+ characters in a single piece costs less than if they were bought as separate commissions" thing Isn't supposed to be a buy one get one x% off type situation.

Your commission prices should be accounting for the time you spend communicating with the client, the time you spend on file storage and prep, and the time it takes to properly document your communications and the transaction. Those things all take time and it Really adds up when you do enough comms. And the time they take? doesn't usually change much based on the number of characters.

That's why the second, third, etc, character can cost less. Not because you're giving a discount. Right. Right? Y'all aren't cutting yourself a bad deal, right? You're Not paying yourself less than an exploitative boss would pay you for that time and skilled labor, right?