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wip · 16 hours
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Can Tumblr stop sending notifications to us saying "your crush" posted something, trying to inappropriately romanticize friendships or follows? It's incredibly inaccurate and uncomfortable when I'm sitting next to my husband and get a notification popping up on my screen saying that my "crush" posted something. I don't know if you guys are meaning to treat this like some juvenile dating app but if you're going to do that, there should be a way to opt out of it without having to turn off notifications just so that our online relationships are not being misrepresented.
Answer: Hi there, @theshadowpoet!
So, as luck would have it, we were just having a conversation about this internally. We agree that this phrasing could be problematic and will be changing it via an update this week or soon after.
But that's not all. To turn off this type of notification, you can toggle the "Recent updates" notification settings in the app to banish updates such as these.
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wip · 2 days
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One of the things I enjoyed about the mobile app was how it used to let you format posts through HTML or Markdown coding. Would it be possible to bring it back? It's kinda weird that the NPF Editor is used on all different platforms, but HTML and Markdown are exclusive to desktop and the mobile website.
Answer: Hey there, @violetganache42!
Sadly, we are not going to bring it to the mobile apps. While we understand that it can be handy to a few people, we are sorry to say it is not handy enough, to not enough folks, to warrant prioritizing that work now.
Should this ever change, however, you will find this at the usual channels: here or over at @changes.
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wip · 3 days
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With so many badges I have found I’ve bought more than I like the look of on my blog all at the same time and it seems a waste to have them sitting there — will we ever be able to assign a badge to sideblogs without having to purchase separately?
Answer: Hello, @shane-west!
So, it is true that you can only buy most badges for one blog at a time right now. Someday, however, we would like to make this a little more like how a video game works—and create an inventory of badges you can swap across blogs. That said, right now, we are not really sure when we’re going to get to that work.
Stay tuned to the usual channels here: WIP and @changes. We will keep you posted.
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wip · 4 days
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There's a plot twist, folks. A few of you have noticed that you already have this, and it turns out you're absolutely right.
So, to update this answer: we actually just did this, and it's not theoretical anymore. Check out the recent Changes blog post here for more info! There's also a page at the Help Center for your reading pleasure. 
All we can say is things were moving fast! That's how great an idea this was. 
I recently encountered yet another tumblr user who didn't realize that the Blog Settings option to hide your blog from search engines also includes tumblr's own search. It's surprisingly common in my experience, where people for years complain that search is broken for their blog, or that their posts don't show up in the public tags/search, but have no idea it was their own choice that put them in that situation. I know that the explainer text for the "discourage searching of [blog]" option is definitely more detailed than it used be, but if you haven't checked your settings since then, well...
Anyway, is it possible that the option could be separated into "hide from external search engines" and "hide from tumblr's search"? For people who would prefer not to be googleable (and assumed that's the only thing the option was doing) but are ok with their posts showing up in tumblr's own search.
Or possibly the options could be "hide from external search engines" and "turn off tumblr search for my blog"? Or at the very least, could there be further explainer text that hiding your from tumblr's search means that your blog's own searchbar won't ever find anything?
Answer: Hello, @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly!
Well, what do you know. We were looking at this same issue just recently and could not agree more: this setting really should be separated. Ideally, it would look a little something like this:
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We need to take another look at this, as splitting search settings into Tumblrs vs. others makes a whole lot of sense. What is less clear is when a member of the team will have the capacity to work on it.
But rest assured we will be adding this to our agenda, and will be in touch with you with updates as and when we have them. And we hope you do not have to wait too long for news on this. We’ll keep you posted!
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wip · 4 days
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I recently encountered yet another tumblr user who didn't realize that the Blog Settings option to hide your blog from search engines also includes tumblr's own search. It's surprisingly common in my experience, where people for years complain that search is broken for their blog, or that their posts don't show up in the public tags/search, but have no idea it was their own choice that put them in that situation. I know that the explainer text for the "discourage searching of [blog]" option is definitely more detailed than it used be, but if you haven't checked your settings since then, well...
Anyway, is it possible that the option could be separated into "hide from external search engines" and "hide from tumblr's search"? For people who would prefer not to be googleable (and assumed that's the only thing the option was doing) but are ok with their posts showing up in tumblr's own search.
Or possibly the options could be "hide from external search engines" and "turn off tumblr search for my blog"? Or at the very least, could there be further explainer text that hiding your from tumblr's search means that your blog's own searchbar won't ever find anything?
Answer: Hello, @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly!
Well, what do you know. We were looking at this same issue just recently and could not agree more: this setting really should be separated. Ideally, it would look a little something like this:
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We need to take another look at this, as splitting search settings into Tumblrs vs. others makes a whole lot of sense. What is less clear is when a member of the team will have the capacity to work on it.
But rest assured we will be adding this to our agenda, and will be in touch with you with updates as and when we have them. And we hope you do not have to wait too long for news on this. We’ll keep you posted!
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wip · 7 days
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Now that Live is gone, will the “make post” button return to its spot between “search” and “activity” on the bottom menu bar?
Answer: Hello, @tisorridalamor!
Long story short: it’s unlikely it will return to the nav bar. 
It is still undecided what exactly will happen with this space, but we are actually playing around with the idea of adding an icon there for Communities, which we’re experimenting with.
Watch this space, here, so to speak.
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wip · 8 days
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desktop user here: I tried out patio and initially thought hm, seems okay, I might use this… until I realized I no longer had access to my right side panel of options. The multiple options screen is cool, I'd happily use it to view activity on my different blogs at the same time, but it's not enough columns to replace (rather than add to) being able to toggle between queue and drafts and posts easily from the activity page. Would love if you would have it be a way to ADD options and functionality as I originally thought it was rather than to just switch one set of options for a different one.
Answer: Hey, @b-a-n-d-e-r!
Thanks for your question. We suppose this is a matter of preference!
You can have your activity, blog, drafts, and queue columns side by side, and be able to see all of them at the same time. It’s also a separate page, so you can still use the other pages.
As things stand, we are not sure a right sidebar would make sense for Patio. But we’ll give it some thought and keep you updated.
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wip · 9 days
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hey i was wondering if yall were working on fixing ads shutting off music cuz it’s rly annoying and i can’t afford ad free :(
Answer: Hi, @moved2-skautism!
Well, as it happens we are already looking at this issue. We agree here—it certainly makes for a less-than-ideal browsing experience. 
We believe it to be related to specific ad creative(s) that we need to track down, but it is difficult for the ads team to pin down. So we need your help for this:
Please report these ads as broken.
a. Tap on the three dots in the top right corner.
b. Select “Report ad”
c. Select “This ad seems broken.”
It would benefit us if you could share a recording of the ad creating the issue. Observing the page and the ad’s avatar color will help identify the demand source. We will also try and reach out to you personally here, too.
Also, sharing the exact timeframe/timezone where you saw the ad would be helpful.
We would reiterate here that the best thing to do is to report the ad. If enough reports come in about a particular ad, it’s easier to pinpoint the malicious ones. Hopefully, we will get this resolved sooner rather than later, and we will keep you posted!
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wip · 10 days
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for my birthday I would love it if you let us pause videos
Answer: Hi, @pinkopalina!
Good news! You can, as it happens, pause them by long pressing the lightbox in mobile apps. On web, normal video controls are available. 
On Android, you can tap on the video in the lightbox to show or hide normal video controls, too. This is not the case for iOS, however: sadly, normal video controls are not available there at this time.
As and when we take a look at this in the future, you’ll catch the news here at WIP or at @changes. Hopefully before too long.
Thanks for your question!
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wip · 11 days
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Do you plan on enriching post link previews ? With rb chain count or image count, something like that ?
I feel like people outside Tumblr doesn't really grasp the interest of a link because the preview only show the first post
Answer: Hey, hey, @charlignon!
Thanks for your question, which is well worth answering.
We have actually played with this a little bit already and struggled to find a way to make it look good across most of the different permutations of reblogs and posts across Tumblr.
Take, for example, this blog—which shows like, reblog, and reply counts if you share a post in a place like Discord:
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This is something that we’re still playing with, but it’s not quite right yet. As it is ongoing work, you can be sure to get updates over at @changes as well as here at WIP as and when we have them.
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wip · 14 days
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For a long time now, it's been impossible to see comments or reblogs with comment/tags on posts over a certain age when using the mobile app or blog view. Today I was looking at a post from 2015 that I knew had at least one reblog comment and lots of tags, but all the reblogs were under "other". I found the comment (but couldn't see any tags) by going to the [blog name].tumblr.com/post/[###] link and scrolling through all the notes in one list, but it's impossible anywhere else.
I know this probably has to do with the many changes Tumblr has gone through in that time, but it's still really inconvenient to have disappearing notes on the platform where part of the charm is that posts can survive for, at this point, almost a decade and a half.
Is it even possible to fix this, and of so, is it something you would consider?
Answer: Hey there, @maplerosekisses!
It is possible to fix this, and we would like to fix it, but it’s a daunting problem at Tumblr’s scale. Buckle up for storytime.
Long, long ago, Tumblr was created, and in the beginning, there weren’t even notes on posts. There weren’t even reblogs or likes. In fact, we were one of the first platforms to introduce the heart icon and the concept of “likes”! We created the reblog! Back in those days, each of these actions were tracked separately. Likes were tracked in one database table and reblogs weren’t tracked at all as notes. When we introduced replies, those had yet another way of being tracked in our database. Totally separate entities on the platform for years.
Eventually, we wanted to consolidate these into one number—so we had to count each of those different places. That’s horribly inefficient, and as Tumblr grew in size and popularity, this became a bottleneck that hurt the whole platform. So one of the things we did was to invent a new denormalized database table called “notes,” to track all of these different things in one place so we could easily count them. We still have that table, and it’s still the fallback whenever we need to count the notes on a post.
But this itself is ancient history. Since then, the product has changed even more, and we removed replies and re-added them later, back in 2015 or so—and made some changes in that process to help further improve efficiency. These improvements allowed us to include media in the notes view, and be able to split out replies versus reblogs-with-comment versus likes (kind of going back to the way it was originally.) Even then, we didn’t yet support showing tag usage in the notes—that would come even later.
In the process of making all of these changes for efficiency and functionality, we had to ask ourselves, as you point out: should we try to backfill these new database tables with all of the data from before? For a long while, we were using both systems to power the notes view, so we could display as much information from “before” as we could. Eventually, we didn’t need to do that anymore, because the number of people scrolling back to that “before” time became infinitesimally small. And that's the situation we’re in today.
Because if we wanted to backfill the data, we would need to process literally tens of billions of posts and notes from before 2015, at a conservative estimate. Let’s say it’s 10,000,000,000, for the sake of argument: if we started an automated process to go through them at ~100 per second (which would be relatively safe at our scale, so Tumblr doesn’t break as we’re digging up these old rows in the database), it would take over three years of continuous operation to complete that task.
In situations like this, we have to ask ourselves if that’s worth it. So far, the answer we’ve determined is no. But we may find a more efficient way to do it, there’s undoubtedly a way, and when we do, we will re-evaluate the decision again. We hope that makes sense—trying to make changes to Tumblr can be really, really hard.
But thank you for your question. We appreciate them and hope that goes some way to answering your query. Keep 'em coming, y'all.
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wip · 15 days
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hello! will there be a way to make a text post that contains more than 30 images soon? the way it was possible in the old post editor? or could you consider bringing the old editor back as an option for users?
Answer: Hey, @guzhu-furen!
So, adding more than ten images in the old editor was actually a bug, and not intended. 
We did raise the limit to 30 in the new editor, but we do not intend to raise it higher at this time.
Thanks for your question, we appreciate it. And keep ’em coming, folks!
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wip · 16 days
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Hello! I've noticed that sometime in the last few months, we seem to have lost the ability to re-order sideblogs? At least, I haven't been able to do so through any means (app, desktop version, desktop version on mobile web browser or standard mobile web browser), and it was a very helpful tool, especially for using the quick queue or reblog features on the app. Any chance of that making a comeback someday?
Thanks for your time!
Answer: Hi, @dr-paine!
Snap! As it happens we have run into this issue ourselves, just a few weeks ago. However, a fix has since been rolled out, and we are glad to say that it works again now, just fine. 
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and have a lovely day.
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wip · 17 days
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can we get a community notes feature similar to twitters? I think it would be really helpful for combatting misinformation since editing posts doesn’t change reblogs
Answer: Hi there, @neon-draws-sometimes!
There are no plans for this, but we can say there is discussion. It could be something we incorporate into Communities, though we wonder how useful this ultimately might be. It could also be interesting to add for moderators to leave a note in a post inside their community, like a little “Editor’s note” or “Community rules” kind of addition.
Needless to say, while we cannot promise anything, we are certainly talking it through. If we have updates, you will be the first to know!
Thanks for your question, and have a lovely day.
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wip · 1 month
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I'd like to suggest the Tumblr ad-free browsing option also come with a profile badge, either the Tumblr Supporter Badge or its own custom one
Answer: Hello there, @dude1818!
Don’t worry, we are working on something like this. And the good news is that it will be opt-in, no matter what we do here.
Something else that may be of interest to you: we surveyed a big ol’ chunk of y’all about this, a special badge for subscribing to Ad-Free, and the resounding feedback on that was negative. People, quite literally thousands of them, really do not want to show off that they are subscribers, except explicitly with the Supporter badge. Even then, not everyone turns that on. They simply use it as a way of sending us some financial support.
With this in mind, we have tried to keep our work on badges as something more fun and not as status-driven. And there will be news on this pretty, pretty soon.
Thanks for your question here, and have a lovely day.
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wip · 1 month
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I’ve been getting notifications about people adding gifs that are credited to me to their posts. These are not my gifs. I assume this is a glitch that must tie back to some update on the site and likely won’t be fixed anytime soon, but is there at least a way to turn off these specific types of notifications?
Answer: Hey, @iguanodonwildman!
Thanks for this. We have contacted you directly for more information, but we also have some suggestions we would like to share.
If you upload a GIF to a post (instead of inserting a link to one or using the GIF search), that GIF becomes inadvertently “yours.” Also, keep in mind that folks can edit their post to replace your GIF at any time after the notification is sent. It would certainly be nice if there were a notification type that could be muted, separately from others (and may we take this chance to say that we would love to build this one day, only it is not clear when. While we would like to add it… we’ve got a lot of other things we need to build first.) 
So, as there isn’t right now, if you are uploading a GIF to your post instead of inserting it, here are some temporary solutions:
First, try to avoid uploading or reposting other people’s GIFs, and use the GIF search when possible.
Alternatively, you could also copy the link to a GIF already hosted on Tumblr and paste that link into the post editor. It will insert that GIF without them needing to download and reupload it.
For those unsure how to copy image links, you right-click and select “Copy Image Link.” On Android, you tap and hold on an image, select “Share photo,” and copy the URL. iOS does not provide a way for us to do this in our iOS app. 
Alternatively, what works well is that you can get the first GIF in any post by pasting the post’s permalink into the GIF search. Bonus point: this will also embed any static image like a GIF, complete with a credit link. The only downside is that only the first image is returned, so GIFsets are out of the question unless you want to use the first GIF.
We hope this helps, and thanks for getting in touch with this. 
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wip · 1 month
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how cool would it be to have post type filters for Drafts and Queue? I dunno if it’s ever been attempted at a hack day but I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate such a sweet feature being added
Answer: Hello, @sade--panda!
We don’t understand exactly what you mean here. You can see feeds of your drafts and your queued posts! But we may have got you wrong.
If it is, for example, “Only photo posts” or “Only text posts” in Drafts and Queue that is what you mean, then we can say that this would be neat! However, we also have doubts that enough people would use such a thing for it to be useful only in those places. So we’d want to make those filtering options available in all feeds.
Thanks for your question!
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