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. 

With communities are group tumblrs finished? can group tumblrs be turned into communities? also will tumblr notify a user if their community idea is rejected? what about communities that have multiple purposes, can communities join together if they have the same goal? or will Tumblr make the communities decide on who can survive?

Answer: Hi there, @richardmurrayhumblr!

All important questions, so we are taking them one at a time.

Absolutely not. In fact, the code behind group blogs is what is powering communities right now! But they have very different purposes and only overlap in some ways. We have no plans to remove group blogs.

Because group blogs and communities do share a lot of code right now, this is something we’ve been thinking about doing. Some of the inspiration for communities has come from group blogs that are run as a way for people to get together in one space and share content—that is exactly what we hope for communities, too. We can’t say when we’ll get to this, but it’s an interesting idea.

This waitlist is temporary, so we’re not sending out notices for the communities we don’t approve. We may not even get through all of them before we open up creation for everyone, in which case, the ones we didn’t approve can be created then!

That’s an interesting idea! We’re not really sure yet. The way we’ve envisioned it so far is not to try to enforce the notion that there is “one community” about a given subject. Instead, there can be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of communities about a given subject, and each of them will probably be a little different in their own way. That’s how communities of people on Tumblr already behave, most of the time. We’re just building an easier way to structure them.

That said, we are very interested in adding ways for communities to link to each other. So if there are a bunch of communities about the same subject, they can form some kind of ring or cluster together.

All great questions—thank you for getting in touch. Keep 'em coming, folks!

hi tumblr wip! is there anything that can be done about images stretching to the full width of a tumblr post? i make art and images that are sometimes under 540px, and there seems to be a point where they will stretch automatically to 540px. it makes things like pixel art or otherwise small images look terrible!

Answer: Hi there, @moxley!

We’re really glad you asked this question, as we love getting the opportunity to share the tips and tricks that are applicable in this area.

First off, here are the rules of our image stretching:

However, the vast majority of devices and browsers use antialiasing in their default image scaling algorithms. This, as you point out, doesn’t play nicely with pixel art at all. Boooooo!

So, how can you preserve your sharp pixels with 100% consistency for your viewers? The answer is simply to upscale the image yourself before uploading. To keep the pixels square, you’ll need to resize by factors of 100% (200%, 500%, etc.) and use a simple upscaling algorithm that doesn’t use antialiasing. For example, in Paint.NET’s image resize dialog, you can use “Resampling: Nearest Neighbor”, or in GIMP’s, “Interpolation: None”.

The trick here is to resize your pixel art to dimensions above 540px wide so that every viewer’s device is actually forced to downscale the resultant image instead. That way, instead of the resizing algorithm making up details by blurring the pixels, each original pixel is preserved as a perfect square.

We really hope this helps you and the other pixel artists out there. Please, have a great day, week, and month. No, in fact—a great rest of your Tumblr experience, however long it may last. Of course, if you have any other questions on this subject, we will be happy to answer those too!

Hi! Any chance we could ever have the opportunity to tell you *why* we’re reporting an ad as inappropriate? Like a chance to explain that “I’m specifically reporting this ad for sexual content and animal abuse”? Because I feel like you most likely have a bot reviewing reports right now, since I keep seeing the same ad again and again and again despite reporting it. I know the answer is probably no because that would indeed be a Lot Of Work, which I understand. Just throwing the idea out there!

Answer: Hi, @crazycatladyinwaiting!

We want to take this opportunity to reassure you all that real humans take the time to look at every report. This has its pros and cons.

The cons: we receive a lot of reports which, as you say, is a lot of work. Unfortunately, there is not a huge number of people available to go through them, and this will likely explain why you’re still seeing potentially inappropriate material. But hold on, here—we hope that, by the time you see this answer on @wip, someone will at least be looking into your report.

The pros: easy. Real humans read every report! Safety and security online are of the highest importance, which is why we hope we will always have real humans on hand to read every report and endeavor to resolve them as quickly as possible.

To answer your original question, there are no plans to let you all tell us why, at present. But we want to assure you the work that goes into this from the staff side of things is considerable, if unseen.

Thank you for your question, and we are sorry that it has taken longer to resolve than we would like.

After Tumblr's backend migration to Wordpress, will the entire content of all half of billion blogs will be deleted??

Answer: Hi, @garotaviciada!

It’s important to note here that this is just the engine running the site, and there will be no changes to the front-end. So no—we’re not deleting content. All of Tumblr’s blogs, and the content on them, will continue to be served, both at the blog address and in the apps. There will just be different tech running under the hood.

Perhaps the simplest way to say so is that, besides a bug or two here or there, how you know and use Tumblr will not change at all. We hope this helps clarify things.

As it happens, we have answered similar questions here and here in the recent past—they also might be of interest. Thanks for getting in touch, and keep the questions coming, folks!