#new user guide

[tuiccim]

PSA for New Users/Blank Blogs/Ageless Blogs

If you keep getting blocked from content creator blogs there are three major reasons and ways to fix them.

🚩🚩🚩This is a Huge RED flag!🚩🚩🚩

1. Update your avatar. Anything besides the default picture.

2. Update your blog title and description. "Untitled" is a red flag that you are a bot. Something as simple as "Here for the fanfic! 18+" will do it. If you want to follow an 18+ blog, add your age range or 18+ to the blog title/description to let them know you are an adult.

3. Reblog or post something to let us know you aren't just a bot. You can reblog some of your favorite content or make a post that just says "Human. Please don't block me!"

4. Please respect others' boundaries. If a blog says they are 18+, don't follow them if you are a minor. If a blog posts things you aren't interested in, unfollow or block them.

Most of all, be kind. Kindness costs nothing and means everything.

[awritingotaku]

The Unspoken Rules of Tumblr

As explained by someone who joined around 2019

Tumblr for all intents and purposes is not like other social media websites. Think the “I’m not like other girls” but they are not like other girls and it’s for the better. Having lurked around different social media platforms for years, I picked up on the spoken and unspoken rules that make this website more bearable than other ones. So here’s a list that will be important to new users.

Block but do not engage. Yes the rule that is understood by much of the user base and I think actually is one of the reasons why fandoms here are actually not that bad. If you remember any rule off this list, make it be this one. Why is this rule so important? Because flame wars often don’t change minds and it just creates a toxic environment. If you find someone that infuriates you, don’t attack them and just block. If they are really bad and pose a threat to people, collect evidence and do a warning post explaining why that person is dangerous but still block them.

Everyone here is a clown, even the famous ones. There is no superiority here. The number of followers you have often connects to how much of a clown you are. Now being a clown here isn’t always bad, many famous ones here make people’s days with their posts, but it’s not a contest here. In fact, fame is often considered a curse and once you have engrained yourself into the collective unconscious, you will mainly be remembered for why you became a famous tumblr clown.

Please hide your likes and follows. Don’t know how that started but it’s a thing here.

Likes do nothing, instead reblog. If it doesn’t fit the theme of your main blog, make a side blog for your reblogs.

Use tags. Tags are key here for both as a blog runner and blog reader. It allows you to quickly sort through things and see what you posted.

You don’t have to censor words like die or sex. We instead have trigger warnings tags that people can specifically block out if they don’t want to see content with stuff like that.

You want to been seen and see cool things, the algorithm is not going to do that for you. Instead you have to actively seek out what tags and blogs to follow to get the content you want. It’s more human and unlike most social media you gotta interact with people. If your feed is negative, it’s likely due to who you follow.

Don’t have a blank blog, the obvious bot usernames, or default profile pics. We are so used to fighting bots that we will auto block because of these. Some bots if you just try to click their username will get you viruses so we are careful.

Never forget the tumblr roots. Superwholock while often thought long dead still has a lasting memory here. It’s the websites heritage. Also add Hannibal and My Little Pony.

There is no cringe here for the most part. X Reader writers are just as valid as the artists here. We are all clowns because we are on this site.

Be kind and remember, people are just as human as you.

This has been you guide to Tumblr! I hope you enjoy this hellsite as much as I have.

[yukipri]

To all new folks from the dying bird:

Welcome. I am praying the dying bird can be resuscitated, but either way it's never a bad idea to have a backup social media account.

If you are here for fandom, for creating or supporting creators, for hobbies and passions and discussions, you are the right place.

If you are here for business, professional connections or resumes, finding brands, or influencing or following influencers, this may not be the best fit.

Either way, I know there are tons of helpful guides going around, but sometimes they may not answer your specific questions. If you need someone who knows this site who you can ask questions to without fear of judgement, here is the link to my personal askbox, and I will answer to the best of my ability.

(Please note that I'm out of town for an artist alley rn and may not have time to answer until Monday 11/21/2022, but I will do my best to answer you when I can!)

I'm a creator, primarily an artist but also a writer, as well as general tumblr user, so i have the most experience in those areas! I've been on Tumblr for roughly ten years and have experienced its peak and fall as well as present.

I am genuinely sorry this is happening to Twitter, and if you are forced to move, I hope you can find another home, be it here or elsewhere.

[larphis]

Jesus, I’m done. And now I offically welcome all of the 53 out of 505 followers that I highly suspect of being real. Love you all. If you see this, you’re one of the real ones (quite literally)!

But please, for the love of all things holy, set a profile picture and a description. It doesn’t need to reveal any personal information! Just do it like me, pinterest aesthetic pictures that resonate with you/fandom characters you vibe with, pronouns, age and you’re done.

All lurkers, Reddit and Twitter refugees are more than welcome, just PLEASE make it visible that you aren’t one of the 400 bots I’ve blocked today. Because that grants for a much more user friendly experience on this hellsite! Both for you and for me! I’d hate to block an actual person just because I thought they were a bot.

[tea-and-panthers]

just a quick post. i was reading a few article on how to identify bot accounts and discover that i may be miss identified as a bot/spam account since i’m new and dont know much about this wild west of a platform.

so I am here to help assist other newcomers with a summary of my research, keeping in mind I’ve only been here for a day so if someone more experienced is giving out advice theirs is probably better.

1. bot/spam accounts generally have a default icon and background. (fixed this up first thing i did after making the account was add an icon and i just uploaded a background)

Recommend course of action: add an Icon and background as soon as possible. and maybe play around with you theme a bit.

2.username looks inappropriate or spam like. (this isn’t a problem for me since i didn’t do this because why would I)

Recommend course of action: just don’t, if you may have made this mistake, best to change it.

3. a blog is sending messages that are asking if you want content that is potentially nsfw, example ‘do you want pictures of n***d women on your phone’

Recommend course of action: report and block. i speak from experience, i got one of these messages and didn’t even finish reading it before blocking and reporting. also don’t send this type of message to people wether or not they think you are a bot that would make anyone uncomfortable and explicit content is against community guidelines.

4. apparently like strings on accounts and large amounts of reblogging are suspicious.

so say you go to someone account and read like there art or something and you like everything there. apparently 10 or more likes on one account within a short time period is considered a like string.

this is one I found myself guilty of, so what happened was I found the account of someone who made a series of tutorials on how to draw kobolds that I had found in pinterest so I followed the and i wanted like all the tutorials (there where 10) but i decided that liking just the tutorials seemed suspicious so i liked some art in between (it’s good art.) i now see that liking just the tutorials would have not been as suspicious. to that person, sorry for the spam likes, I have learned my lesson.

Reblogging, so something like 40 or more rebloggs in a day with little context, than nothing for a few days looks suspicious.

Recommend course of action:

like strings; of you come across an account you really like just like 3 or 4 posts and follow. you will get another chance to like more.

Reblogging; i don’t see this one being much of a problem if you just casually use tumblr. I myself have spent some time (but not all my time) on tumblr and Liked around 250 posts over 24 hours but have only reblogged 12 (which is probably still a lot) but i have also added something with the reblog such as a comment along with the normal tags people usually only put (i feel bad reblogging without contributing something). the only way i think you would reach a number like 40+ is if you are on all day with nothing else to do and are reblogging every third post you see (not that i’m judging, apparently reblogging helps more that likes.) or you are reblogging reblogs in response to them on a post that went viral. if you are adding to those i don’t really think that would be suspicious. And try not to reblog too many posts from one blog in a short amount of time that seems very spammy

REPOSTING IS NOT THE SAME AS REBLOGGING

reblogging, if you like the reblog it likes the original post. this is helping in most cases from what i’ve read. (just try not to over do it.)

reposting is copying the image or text (some cases both) and uploading it on your own, often done without permission form or crediting the original author. this is not helpful, if you have permission form the original author and you credit them, that should be ok.

yet again, i am also new and may be mistaken about some of the stuff here. this is based on personal experience and research i’ve done.

hope this helps others new users to this wild west. I intend on posting my art soon i just need to get it all together first, that i can upload a few pieces at a time.

If you are an experienced user who has any corrections of stuff to add I’m sure new users like myself would love the help.

[toaster-boi]

are new users still not customizing their blogs? like people please at least set a blog header other than "untitled" so you don't get mistaken for a bot and blocked immediately

[nikkidee]

For new users who are confused by tag novels

It’s an ancient tumblr practice from back when reblogged posts looked like this:

If you reblogged and added a new caption, it would indent all the previous text, and if someone reblogged from you and added a caption, it would indent again.

Which means sometimes popular posts would become completely unreadable, especially on tumblr’s mobile app.

To avoid this, people would refrain from commenting directly in the post, and would instead take their two cents to the tags. Anything from small comments, to incredible jokes, to in depth commentary could be hidden away in the tags to extend the longevity of the original post.

Obviously they’ve since fixed the format, but we’ve never stopped using tags this way. For those struggling with when to caption and when to tag their responses, maybe consider “is this addition worth making the entire post harder to read”, as that’s where it all started.

[lycanthropicture]

hey just fyi i updated, organized, and removed broken links from the resource guide i made a while ago! it's originally from the resource dump channel of the spn amv editors discord, but it's got helpful stuff for any spn creators (editors, gifmakers, meta-writers, fic writers, etc) and any video editors from any fandom! Here's the link, and here's a lil info on what kind of stuff you'll find on each page:

General Resources - links useful for amv editors from any fandom. things like tutorials, overlay packs, and software downloads.

SPN Scenepacks - big list of links to downloadable scenepacks sorted by character, ship, and season

SPN Episodes, Clips, & Deleted Scenes - what it says on the sign.

Other SPN Resources - various links to spn-specific resources like timelines, transcript search, the amv archive, etc!

anyway, i am asking that you please do not post the link to this drive elsewhere, and especially not on other websites (cough the bird one cough)!! pls keep it on tumblr <3

[claired3lune]

Something I think a lot of those "welcome new users :)" help guides miss is warning new users about how you should be mindful of what you use the blaze feature for. For ex: please don't blaze your fanfics. At best, you'll just get blocked by a bunch of people. At worst, you are going to get unnecessary negativity thrown your way

[larphis]

Little advice for new users: NEVER, EVER, make your main blog a blog dedicated to one thing/a stan account. Because when I like someone’s reblog with a response to my post I always forget that my main blog is a fucking simp blog dedicated to the creators of South Park. So it’s eternal mortification when I imagine the person who reblogged my normal content instantly getting a notification that some old man stan account liked their posts right after they posted, like I fucking stalk them.

Miscalculations were made. For the love of god, don’t be like me.

[chacusha]

My tips to new users to make Tumblr more usable

This is kind of random but I think Tumblr is one of those websites that hides a lot of its functionality from users and comes with default settings that makes it kind unusable (at least for me). So I've decided to collect some suggestions about things to do immediately in order to make Tumblr a much more usable website:

Most important: Put the content you actually opt into on your dash. First, go to Settings > Dashboard and turn off "Best Stuff First." In general, (1) I don't think it's good to let social media sites curate your content feed (they're not very good! you can curate your own content feeds!), and (2) chronological ordering is much more helpful for making sense of information. I don't know why you would want posts on a site to be presented in any other way. Please save yourself and make your dash chronological by toggling this monstrosity OFF. Also for the love of god, turn off "Include posts liked by the blogs you follow" and "Include 'Based On Your Likes!'" too. Other people's experiences might be different from mine, but when Tumblr first introduced this feature and I tried it out for a while, it was so predictable that every time I came across a post that made me viscerally angry and think, "How the HELL did this get on my dash?" it was always always some random post from someone I wasn't even following… So yeah, get rid of that.

Second, make the "Following" tab your default, instead of the "For you" tab. How to do this is not particularly obvious. From the Tumblr homepage (not settings), you need to find the tabs at the top of your dash (For you, Following, Your tags) and then click the toggle/settings icon to the right of those tabs. This will allow you to reorder your tabs. In particular, what you need to do is click the pin icon to the right of "Following," and this will set Following to be your pinned and first tab. By default, when you open Tumblr, your dash will show the posts of people you have actually opted into following rather than what Tumblr suggests to you.

Next, make sure timestamps on posts are on. This should be the default (despite what Tumblr says?), but if you don't see timestamps at the top of all posts, I highly recommend turning this setting on (under Settings > Dashboard). Knowing when a post was made is hugely helpful for understanding the context of the post, and I don't know why websites would allow you to hide this, really, unless they want you walking around with no sense of time or context, which uh… I don't recommend that social media experience!

Turn off endless scrolling (under Settings > Dashboard): Websites like endless scrolling to keep people from leaving the site. I recommend turning this off to make it more obvious how many posts you've scrolled through on Tumblr, to make it easier to find your place in older posts, and also to make the website just lighter to load. When I last used it, the Tumblr mobile app does not allow pagination, which is pretty typical of social media apps in general. Honestly, I recommend just not using the Tumblr mobile app at all. I've uninstalled it and aside from missing the convenience of being able to attach photos from my phone onto Tumblr posts, I really don't miss it…

Things that you may or may not be interested in:

Enable custom theme on (each of) your blog(s): So fun fact: If you don't have a custom theme enabled, then when people visit your blog when not logged into Tumblr, they will only be able to scroll through a few of the posts on your blog before being prompted by Tumblr to log in if they want to see more. This popup cannot be gotten around, and so people without Tumblr accounts or who are browsing on a device/browser without a login session just won't be able to see your posts. Personally, I do not like this behavior -- I like my blogs to be archives with useful permalinks that can be browsed by anyone. Anyway, you can get rid of this annoying prompt by going to Account > (select blog) > Blog settings and toggling that "Enable custom theme" slider. It doesn't really matter what theme you use (although there are a lot of options to choose from), just use a custom one!

Turn off "Shorten long posts" (under Settings > Dashboard): YMMV, but I personally don't find this setting very helpful as the maximum length for when it starts cutting off posts is pretty short and falls far short of what I would consider a "long post" that is inconvenient to scroll past. Instead, you may want to turn off this setting and create a filter for the tag "long post" (under Settings > Account > Filtered Tags).

Mature content: If you're interested in possibly seeing mature content, you may want to review your mature content settings (under Settings > Account) as by default, Tumblr is set to hide it entirely and doesn't tell you that it's hidden posts from you and so you probably just will not be aware this setting is a thing! Personally, I use the "Blur" setting.

Hiding content from users you don't want to see: As far as I can tell, if you see someone's posts in (e.g.) tag searches and would prefer not to see any of that person's posts in public places like that tag or appear on your dash by people you follow reblogging their posts, you should block them. Official Tumblr documentation does not say that this is a feature of blocking, but it is.

When Tumblr's functionality isn't enough… External tools such as XKit Rewritten provide a whole lot of QoL fixes to Tumblr's interface like making it easier to reply to replies, hiding posts you've already seen, showing how many new/unread posts are in tracked tags, showing all tags on posts by default rather than requiring you to click "See all," etc. For me, one thing I needed in order to make Tumblr semi-usable for me is hiding notes in tag searches (because I don't really need constant reminders that my tastes aren't aligned with wider fandom's tastes lol). I couldn't find a tool that does this, so I wrote a simple Tampermonkey script to do it for me.

Hope this helps new users of Tumblr, and feel free to add other helpful tips if you have them!

[thebaconspider]

okay i guess people are coming to tumblr from reddit so i figured i'd make my own guide because the other ones piss me off

so first things first

you're going to want to change your pfp/header/blog description off of the defaults. tumblr has a pretty big bot problem so blogs with default pfp/headers are usually a block on sight for most people. you may also want to make a post saying your new from reddit and maybe reblog some things.

thats the most important thing the rest of this is pretty optional

you're going to want to go into settings under the dashboard tab and change some things.

Endless scrolling: preference thing, i prefer to have it on but you could turn it off if you wanted

Show timestamps on posts, reblogs, and notes.: you're going to want to make sure this is on, posts circulate on tumblr a lot longer than they tend to on other sites. seeing posts from 5+ years ago is a pretty common occurrence.

Shorten long posts: turn this on, you don't want to get color of the sky'd.

Use blog colors when viewing blogs: another preference thing, i personally have it on but there are many reasons you might want to turn it off.

Best Stuff First: you're going to want to turn this off if you want a chronological dashboard.

Include stuff in your orbit: most people will tell you that you must turn this off but you really don't have to, i turn it on myself from time to time. it just puts stuff the people you follow have liked on your dashboard occasionally.

Include "Based On Your Likes!": another one most people will say you need to turn off but you don't really need to. personally i leave it off because if i want to see stuff based on my likes i just go to my for you page.

Include followed tags post: you can turn this one off if you want, i'm not sure why you would follow a tag if you didn't want to see posts from it occasionally.

Enable colorized tags: a preference thing, you can turn this off if you want.

Snooze Tumblr Live: you probably should turn this on but i got tired of turning it on every week so i just ignore the tumblr live stuff. whatever you do don't use tumblr live it's run by another company and harvests your data.

next your gonna want to go to your blog settings.

Enable custom theme: i would really recommend turning this on. it lets you do a bunch of crazy stuff with your blogs theme (including just straight up editing the html) and it also gives you back your [blank].tumblr.com url instead of your just using the tumblr.com/[blank] url.

Share posts you like: makes your likes public, i would recommend turning this off.

Share the Tumblrs you're following: makes the blogs you follow public, i would recommend turning this off.

now for some feature of the site

this is the like button, you press it if you like something. you can only like a post once. some users will bitch at you if you use it, kill them.

this is the reblog button, you press it if you want something to show up on your blog. you can reblog a post as many times as you want.

you can add tags, text, images (anything you could put in a post) on a reblog but you don't have to.

this is the reply button, you press it if you want to leave a comment on a post. it's kinda strange and i don't like using it.

tags

tags are cool, you can use them to find things or organize the stuff on your blogs.

some people say the search function doesn't work which just isn't true. sure searching for the content of a post doesn't really work but searching by tag works pretty well in my experience.

to do this type the tag you want into the search bar and then click "Go To #[tag]"

you can also filter tags if you don't want to see posts with that tag, they'll still show up on your dash they'll just be blurred and you'll need to click on them to see them. it will say which tags it has that are causing it to be filtered.

people also often use tags to leave a little comment on posts or communicate back and forth or hold additional information.

community labels

i don't really see people talking about these, i don't think many people use them, but your probably going to want to set these to either "Show" or "Blur"

note: if you set a label to "Hide" posts with that label will not show up for you at all

iirc all of these are set to "Hide" by default so remember to change that setting if you want to.

one last thing: the queue

the queue is pretty neat, if you want to reblog something later, but don't have a specific time in mind, you can queue it!

you can change how many things in your queue are posted a day and what times of day they get posted on your queued post page.

and thats everything i can think of.

apologies if i forgot anything.

[just-aro]

y'all have no idea how much effort goes into trying to interpret and respond to some of the questions we get about aromanticism lol.

like kee does so much tonal phrasing to be nice about this, but. please. "what is aromantic?" i am not google. "i don't know if i feel romantic attraction." cool, i'm not gonna be able to tell you what it feels like either. "hi, what if I am a person and not one of the major aro stereotypes?" then you are a person who is aro and doesn't fit that stereotype.

and like, whatever, we deal with those fine. but the worst. the absolute worst. is the ones where the ask is more or less requesting me to speak for aromantic people as a whole, or - worse and more commonly - a specific subset of aro people who i may not identify with, and almost always insist they aren't trying to be bad, but have such a questionable mindset behind it that i feel like i need to start with "how to identify that you haven't unlearned shit, you just realized you have an identity and stuck your tongue out at the people who taught you that shit"