Welcome to Work in Progress! Tumblr’s official ask box, where we try to answer as many questions as we can about Tumblr: what we’re working on, hope to work on, or even your suggestions! We hope it can be a little halfway between staff and you fine folk, the community.
Please note if you’re experiencing an issue/glitch/bug on Tumblr, do not send here at WIP—please file a Support request instead of sending us an ask.
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#wip speaks #wipHey, folks. A little WIP-themed update for you. A WIPdate, if you will.
Following on from this recent ask, not only have we decided to listen to this sage advice, but we will be changing the opening hours of our ask box.
From Monday, July 4, not only will it be open a full 12 hours, but during this trial period, you will be able to submit questions anytime between 6AM and 6PM (Eastern Standard Time). Don’t say we don’t spoil you!
Keep the feedback coming, as always.
Love,
The humans behind @wip
encyclop3dia asked:
does the tumblr staff read fanfiction?
Hi @encyclopediabitch,
The short answer is yes. We’re finally coming out of our caves with this. We read fanfic, and we love it. The long answer, provided by some of our WIP regulars, can be found below. So I guess the only question now is: Do you read fanfic? Do you write it? Do you want to tell us about it?
—Loll (Dragon Age fic enjoyer, Tumblr Marketing)
~
“Yes, I read fanfiction every day of my life, and if it’s not a roommate au, I don’t want it!!”
—Bea (Tumblr Marketing)
“HAHAHA YES. If I said I don’t read fanfiction, I would be lying. I go back to the same ones over and over again. Please leave your recs in the comments!”
—Jas (Tumblr Marketing)
“Another big fanfic reader here. I recently binged a bunch of fix-it fics because a show didn’t end the way I wanted 😭.”
—C (Tumblr Engineering)
“Yep, I read a ton of fanfic. I won’t be sharing my bookmarks, but suffice it to say a lot of ’em are good ol’ fashioned fake dating fics.”
—Cates (Tumblr Marketing)
“Yes…Are examples needed? Some of the actors from Deep Space Nine (the best Star Trek) acted out fics over the pandemic on Youtube…”
—Kat (Tumblr Support)
“I used to read and write a fair bit of Command & Conquer fanfic back in the pre-Tumblr 00s, lol.”
—Cyle (Tumblr Engineering)
Sound familiar?
Broken the internet with a post? We love that for you. What we love a little less is the barrage of likes and reblogs you have probably received. This can be a little intense. A bit much. Stressful, even. And unnecessarily so.
If your post has gone stratospheric, but you don’t want to completely mute notifications for it, we are working on something that might just help. We are experimenting with grouping your push notifications from anyone you don’t follow into neat, occasional summaries. This will roll out to a small number of you, first as an A/B test, for a limited time.
Why are we doing this?
We hope to steady, streamline, and calm your Tumblr experience when you’re grappling with overwhelming notifications from a popular post or reblog. The goal here is to reduce overload so you can receive the notifications you care about the most—while keeping up to speed with everything else.
In July, you may remember that we turned on post-level muting on the web. We also extended muting to affect your activity feed, as well as your push notifications. This feature is the next step in managing notification overload—one that will make your devices a little more peaceful and, hopefully, work a little more proactively against the problem.
Before and after:
Feedback?
We’re all ears. Let us know what you think in the replies—we would love to hear from you. And we will be back in touch with updates on this test in the near future.
It was HACK WEEK at Tumblr and Automattic earlier this month! Just like back in June, we stopped our normal work to focus on some great possible new features, some bug fixing, and more. Here’s a taste of some of the projects that got hacked together. Some of these will hopefully make it to be real new parts of Tumblr, but as always, we can’t guarantee anything here with a timeline or even that they’ll ever see the light of day again -- they’re hacks!
L and @superchlorine are working on fixing a lot of issues about how we parse tags in URLs, so that we are more consistent across the web and the apps. This is something that we know has been frustrating for a long time: trying to search for posts tagged with a + sign or with spaces often doesn’t work as you’d expect. But not for much longer! We’ve been slowly fixing these issues one at a time and posting about it on the Changes blog.
This actually carried over from a previous Hack Day: the ability to click a little 🔥 button on a post, throw down some cash, and promote that post as a Sponsored post across Tumblr. There’d be some kind of moderation queue on our side to ensure nothing unsafe gets sponsored in this way, and any sponsored post would be “frozen” and not editable during the time it’s being promoted. The Ads Core team, lead by @thstall with help from Argyris, Oleg, and Nathan took this pretty far towards being production-ready.
We really want as many people as possible to protect their accounts by leveraging Two Factor Authentication, which you can currently enable by going to your account settings on the web. But it’d be even better to be able to access these settings in the mobile apps themselves! Megs, Adam, and Eduardo are still working to make this a reality.
For those of you who remember this experiment in Tumblr Labs, this is a popup you can check out on posts which shows you a graph of all of the reblogs on a post and how they’re connected. This is one crazy way you can visualize how posts on Tumblr get reblogged around in huge chains and clusters! @cyle got a working React-based prototype working for Hack Week, and now we’re working to bring this back to the web for real.
Connie and the Post+ team built a prototype of Fan Funding on Tumblr, to help creators set a funding goal and get to that goal, using a lot of the same technology we used to create Post+.
Stay tuned to the @changes blog to find out if any of these end up becoming a part of Tumblr for real!
Here’s a peek at what our engineers worked on during our recent Hack Week!
anonymoussomeone3 asked:
why aren't you answering my questions?
Hello @anonymoussomeone3! Thanks for your question.
It’s an important one, too, and could not have come at a better time. It’s been a touch busy here at HQ with new hellsite features such as Post+, the tip jar, and the new notes view, to name just a few. Amid these spinning plates, we couldn’t help but notice our ask queue creep up to 1,000 and counting.
Who is ‘we,’ exactly? Well, we’re a friendly mix of folk from different teams. We’re fewer than you might expect, and pulling the best possible answers from many different points of expertise across the company takes a lot more time and coordination than you might expect.
@wip exists as a direct channel between you, the humans who make up our community, and us, the humans who have the joy of running these spaces and answering your questions. It’s time-consuming, but we love to do it—and we are psyched to collaborate with you like this. It’s what sets Tumblr apart from, well, pretty much everywhere else.
We’ll keep answering your questions as quickly as we can and are putting things in place to be better able to do so going forward. So stay tuned!
With love,
The humans behind @wip.
We have a quick favor to ask of you: we’d love it if you could take a few minutes to take a survey about domains.
Yes, we know, it might sound a bit nerdy or technical. But trust us, your input is really important! By understanding how you use custom domains on Tumblr, we can improve and make it better for everyone.
Whether you’re a seasoned Tumblr veteran or a brand new user, we want to hear from you. Plus, there might even be a surprise in store for those who complete the survey ;)
Any data collected as part of your participation in this survey will be handled according to the Tumblr Privacy Policy.
inclines asked:
Hi team! Something of a meta question, but would you ever consider opening the wip askbox for a longer period? The hours as listed are effectively 11pm to 8am in my timezone - I've had questions in the past (since addressed!) but have never been able to ask them as I haven't been able to catch the form when it's open. Thanks for all you do, hope you and the team have a great day!
Hello there, @inclines!
First things first: yes! We think this is a fabulous idea and we’re happy to keep the Ask box open for a few more. We will now open the Ask box for an extended three hours from next Monday, June 27, meaning it will run from 9AM to 9PM EST—a whole 12 hours.
Second things, well, second. This is a great question and a chance to give you and the community a little insight into the nuts and bolts workings at Tumblr. The core team that oversees the blog here at Work in Progress is pretty small, and the effort required to receive, draft, and answer your questions is more than you might think.
Don’t get us wrong—it’s a job we love and never take for granted. We like to think small touches like WIP are what set Tumblr apart from other platforms. However, for the moment, this small touch requires a surprising amount of work for a small unit. But we would love to open up for a few more hours and see if this helps out users from each and every corner of our lovely blue dot. We are glad you appreciate our work, as we love it too.
Thanks for your feedback, and have a good week.
Best,
—Cates (Tumblr Marketing)
