#i think the staff or buggy code has removed the visual flag

[greyias]

More Shenanigans from Flaggy the PuritanBot

So, having the day off work, I decided to finally rub two braincells together and run the lovely @flight-of-the-felix’s script that helps you track down potentially flagged posts. As suspected, there’s a bunch of posts that it turned up, including the oh-so-salacious thumb-biting sketch that I couldn’t actually request a review on when I found it on my sideblog on Monday.

(The above was taken on Monday, when Flagathon began.)

So here’s the interesting thing, I can’t pull up the orange “this post has been flagged” anywhere else for any of the posts. I begin to wonder what the heck is going on, so I go back to the one post I know is still flagged, first on my desktop, and it’s “clean”. Nothing indicating it was ever falsely flagged as explicit. Then I go back to my phone, scroll alllllll the way down and find it, and oh! There’s the flag. “Cool”.

Except I accidentally tapped into the notes of the post above it, because Tumblr Mobile hates fun, and it’s users apparently. When I get out of the notes of that post, the flag for the “explicit” thumb biting sketch has mysteriously disappeared. And it won’t come back.

See, the thing is, I’m fairly certain that Tumblr hasn’t had a change of heart and realized the error of its ways on this particular post, because of the two posts I was able to find on Monday and request review on, I got an e-mail telling me they had been restored.

Not so on the thumb-biting naughtiness.

It’s very hard for me to verify on my own, since this entire system was rolled out in an extremely underhanded way that seems unintentionally designed to cull half of their userbase, but I’m starting to suspect the reason I haven’t been able to find flagged posts since Tuesday is because they turned off the ability to request review. Or it’s possible there’s glitches in the code (what? Tumblr??? code something badly???), or, and this is my personal theory, Flaggy the PuritanBot crashed itself by flagging everything on the internet except for the pornbots, and the “review” system is now clogged up and useless.

I’m mostly just pointing this as something to be cautious about come December 17th, because there’s not really much any of us can do about this. Tumblr has said that it won’t delete or deactivate our accounts for old content, but I think the events of this week (combined with the revelations of the Vox article) have shown that they’re not exactly the most trustworthy source right now, and they are not acting in good faith with their users.

As I said before, I’m not planning on going anywhere, and will just be trying to cross-post to various platforms until fandom as a whole decides where it belongs. But I don’t have the greatest of feelings about this.

Back up your stuff guys

I guess we’ll see how all of this shakes out when the 17th arrives.