Hello!
Work in Progress will be taking a little festive time out over the holiday season, beginning today, Monday, December 23, until Monday, January 6, 2025.
We will be back in the new year to take your questions, queries, and fantastic ideas for our little world here on Tumblr. It will be a whole new year. Can you believe it?
In the meantime, we wish you and your loved ones a happy and restful holiday season.
—The Tumblr WIP Team.
captainstrawberrywings asked:
Will you be doing our Year in review 2024 this year? Or have you stopped it completely because you didn’t do it last year?
Answer: Hi, @captainstrawberrywings!
Thanks for getting in touch here, and we hope you’ve been enjoying Year in Review 2024!
Unfortunately, while we had a really fun time building Your Year in Review in 2022, it’s true that it was a fair amount of work, and we struggled to make it a feature we could repeat again. It didn’t make the cut of projects to work on in 2023, sadly, and it didn’t make the cut to work on this year either, as you may have seen by now. As things stand, it’s not on our roadmap to do again.
That said, there is a lot of love for this feature on staff, too, and we would love to make it happen—so never say never!
psycho-magnotheric-slime asked:
hey guys!
I saw a release from Automattic that said something about migrating Tumblr's backend to Wordpress for easier updates and better infrastructure. do you guys have more info on how that'll work?
also, I saw one of your recent posts about allowing more features for sideblogs, which is great. but is there a plan to allow a user to change which blog is their primary? I know I'm not the only person who no longer uses their primary blog, and it would be nice to switch functionality to the blog that I use more often.
thanks so much!
Answer: Hey there, @psycho-magnotheric-slime!
To answer your first question, we answered a very similar question very recently.
We’re in the planning and prototyping phase right now, so we don’t have a lot of details to share. But we will share our plans and progress as it becomes clearer.
Some of the pieces we’re discussing are:
To answer your second, we can say that we have looked into this several times in the past, but it is a tricky problem that requires some careful work. There are a lot of assumptions baked into Tumblr about how primary and secondary blogs work, and it would be particularly difficult to switch them around. It’s also not something we’ve had a chance to prioritize, in recent times.
We should also use the opportunity to clarify that, besides a bug or two here or there, how you know and use Tumblr will not change!
We hope this helps. Have a great day!
kuromi-hoemie asked:
AH ANOTHER ONE, POST LIMITS!!!!!
I don't know why we're still only using 250 posts per day across all blogs. I hit this SO often and it's extremely frustrating. Are there plans to raise this???? Double it to 500?? Make it 250 PER BLOG at least???
Something that isn't just roughly ten posts an hour, which can go by extremely fast when you're trying to support artists and various crowdfunding efforts. There's not even a way to increase post limit with an ad free subscription, this seems like something that doesn't need to stay the way it is and i feel like we should talk about this and figure out a better number.
I get how limits help fight back against spam, but last week i kept hitting post limit early in the day because the counter resets at 9pm for me - so all of my late night posts + everything that piled up in the queue since i was blocked all day before 9pm gives me significantly less room to work with the next day. I am not spam, i am a human being, and doing regular organic activity is getting me driven off the site!!! the way this feels is like do you want us on here or not lol?? why are we being punished for finding it engaging, I do not think 250 is a reasonable limit.
250posts/24hrs is 10.4 posts an hour, and is all you have to work with regardless of how many other side blogs you maintain. There's not even a way to see how many posts you have left for the day, I think post limit needs addressing!!!! or at least some kind of acknowledgement to start!! 250 forever just does not make sense
wip answered:
Answer: Hi there, @cinna-bunnie!
A little tease for y’all, because we just can’t help it—we hear you loud and clear. We are working on this, and we think you should stay tuned.
👀
You’ll know more soon, and we like to think you might like what you see. Have a great day, and keep the questions coming, folks.
So, you stayed tuned. We have news for you, and hope you like what you see.
taikeero-lecoredier asked:
On another note,i know Tumblr servers are expensive to keep up but if there was a donation progress for this site like ao3 it would help relieve the costs a little i think. I hope Tumblr is able to cover servers costs once the situation at hand is resolved.
wip answered:
Answer: Hi, @taikeero-lecoredier!
Good question! And please do excuse us while we make a shameless plug or two.
At present, the best way to support Tumblr is simply by purchasing something from TumblrMart: perhaps a swanky badge, or maybe Ad-Free Browsing is more to your tastes. Every dollar (and other currency) helps! And there’s plenty there for everyone.
And stay tuned to this, too. We will have more avenues for supporting your platform of choice in due course. Watch this space, folks.
moitt asked:
morning wips! i wanna get involved with the communities rollout! i've submitted a couple of them for review already. however, even for someone like me that is v ready for it, it's hard to engage with communities as a concept because it's not clear what they'll be, not possible to browse existing ones, and there's no info about how they might look or feel like to use. could we have a list of communities that are already happening (even if we can't access them yet), a walkthrough of how communities look or some other descriptive resource? the current info about communities isn't telling very much. these suggestions are made with positive enthusiasm - i WANT to get hype - but it feels v much like we're fumbling in the dark/contributing to something that we don't get to see atm and i think some clarity would help. kis kis kis !!
wip answered:
Answer: Hi there, @moitt!
Thank you for these. All great, fair questions!
And we are happy to answer them. Admittedly, we are fumbling in the dark a little, you might say—that is why it’s still an experiment. We have our own ideas for how Communities could work, but really, we want to build it based on what people actually do with it. This is why the current functionality is fairly simple and limited. We’ve wanted to see what feedback we get and to understand what people ask for and expect—rather than spending a long time building something that may be unappealing to the people we hope will use it (we’ve made that mistake many times in the past!) You can see a little bit of that dialogue in the Feedback community.
To your point about seeing communities—right now, we’re working on ways of integrating public communities into existing feeds, search, tagged pages, etc., so that they can be discovered by people who aren’t in any yet (which is most people on Tumblr!) We hope that by seeing other people use it, you’ll get a better explanation than anything we could try to provide—because every community is doing things in their own interestingly unique way right now. We don’t want to be prescriptive about how they should be used.
By the way, the same is true with how blogs work on Tumblr—we don’t tell you how to blog. Instead, we hope you try to figure out your own way of blogging by seeing how others behave on the platform.
We hope that helps address at least some of your queries. We would also advise that you have a little look at this handy Help Center explainer into Communities. Above all, we hope y’all like it.
Stay tuned!
ICYMI…
moitt asked:
morning wips! i wanna get involved with the communities rollout! i've submitted a couple of them for review already. however, even for someone like me that is v ready for it, it's hard to engage with communities as a concept because it's not clear what they'll be, not possible to browse existing ones, and there's no info about how they might look or feel like to use. could we have a list of communities that are already happening (even if we can't access them yet), a walkthrough of how communities look or some other descriptive resource? the current info about communities isn't telling very much. these suggestions are made with positive enthusiasm - i WANT to get hype - but it feels v much like we're fumbling in the dark/contributing to something that we don't get to see atm and i think some clarity would help. kis kis kis !!
Answer: Hi there, @moitt!
Thank you for these. All great, fair questions!
And we are happy to answer them. Admittedly, we are fumbling in the dark a little, you might say—that is why it’s still an experiment. We have our own ideas for how Communities could work, but really, we want to build it based on what people actually do with it. This is why the current functionality is fairly simple and limited. We’ve wanted to see what feedback we get and to understand what people ask for and expect—rather than spending a long time building something that may be unappealing to the people we hope will use it (we’ve made that mistake many times in the past!) You can see a little bit of that dialogue in the Feedback community.
To your point about seeing communities—right now, we’re working on ways of integrating public communities into existing feeds, search, tagged pages, etc., so that they can be discovered by people who aren’t in any yet (which is most people on Tumblr!) We hope that by seeing other people use it, you’ll get a better explanation than anything we could try to provide—because every community is doing things in their own interestingly unique way right now. We don’t want to be prescriptive about how they should be used.
By the way, the same is true with how blogs work on Tumblr—we don’t tell you how to blog. Instead, we hope you try to figure out your own way of blogging by seeing how others behave on the platform.
We hope that helps address at least some of your queries. We would also advise that you have a little look at this handy Help Center explainer into Communities. Above all, we hope y’all like it.
Stay tuned!
cloverydreamertt-deactivated202 asked:
giv mi community!>:(
Answer: Hello, @cloverydreamertt!
Well, we are glad you’re excited about Communities! We’re excited, too. We want to get it out to as many people as quickly as we can, but we’re still in the process of building it. Consider yourself on the shortlist of potential beta testers.
For anyone with a little curiosity about this shiny new feature, you can get up to speed right here at the Help Center.
Thanks for your question, and watch this space, folks.
nobodysuspectsthebutterfly asked:
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?
wip answered:
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:
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!
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.
Welcome to Work in Progress!
We have news for you. WIP will now be open for 24 hours each week, opening at 6 a.m. EST each Monday and closing at the same time the next day. An entire day to submit your questions. Just imagine it.
For the uninitiated, Work in Progress is 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 good people, the community.
Please note if you’re experiencing an issue/glitch/bug on Tumblr, do not send it here at WIP—please file a Support request instead of sending us an ask.
Well, that’s all. Tell your pals. Spread the word.