Already seen posts from blogs you follow will no longer appear in your For You feed.
Admins and Moderators can now delete comments in their Communities.
🛠 Fixed
People being invited to join us in the Communities closed beta will be automatically added to the Communities Feedback community. (We were doing this manually before and had missed a few people, sorry about that!)
🚧 Ongoing
No ongoing incidents to speak of right now.
🌱 Upcoming
No upcoming launches to announce today.
Experiencing an issue? Check for Known Issues and file a Support Request if you have something new. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
The first cut of settings for communities is now available. Admins of communities can change the name, tagline, avatar, header image, tags, and description. You can find a link to these settings in the sidebar for your community on desktop, or in the context menu on mobile.
The community invite popup has been given a design refresh, include a counter of how many invites you have left.
Communities now display whether they are public or private in their header.
Community admins can now promote members to moderators. Moderators can delete posts, and we’re still building out the feature, so expect to see things change in the next few weeks!
We’ve updated the blog posts API endpoint to add the options to specify a sort order and an “after” time, to complement the current option to show posts from “before” a specific time. When using “before”, and by default, posts are sorted in reverse-chronological order (“descending”). With “after” and “sort = asc”, you can sort posts from oldest to newest instead, starting at a certain time.
🛠 Fixed
Since secondary blogs cannot post to communities yet, your primary blog will now always be selected when posting to communities.
Certain activity coming from communities, such as mentions in posts and comments, and soon invitations, now count towards your unread activity total.
🚧 Ongoing
We are aware of ads auto-playing audio in the Android app, sometimes quite loudly, and are working on a fix!
🌱 Upcoming
We are working to rename Community Labels to Content Labels across our official clients (Web, iOS, and Android), as well as Community Guidelines to User Guidelines. We hope this change will prevent any potential confusion regarding the relationship between these and Tumblr Communities.
Experiencing an issue? Check for Known Issues and file a Support Request if you have something new. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
If you use Tumblr on a web browser, you might have noticed us testing a brand new navigation on your dashboard in the last month. Now, after some extensive tweaks, weβve begun rolling out this new dashboard navigation to everyone using a web browser. Welcome to the new world. Itβs very like the old world, just in a different layout.
Why are we doing this? We want it to be as easy as possible for everyone to understand and explore whatβs happening on Tumblrβnewbies and seasoned travelers alike.
Labels over icons: When adding something new to Tumblr in the past, weβd simply add a new icon to our navigation with little further explanation. Turns out no one likes to press a button when they donβt know what it does. So now, where thereβs space, the navigation includes text labels. Since adding these, weβve noticed more of you venturing to previously unexplored corners of Tumblr. Intrepid!
Whatβs already been fixed? Thanks to feedback from folks during the testing phase, weβve been able to make some improvements right out of the gate. Those include returning settings subpages (Account, Dashboard, etc.) to the right of the settings page instead of having them in an expandable item in the navigation on the left; fixing some issues with messaging windows on smaller screens; and streamlining the Account section to make it easier to get to your blogs.
Whatβs next? Weβre looking into making a collapsible version of this navigation and improving the use of screen space for those of you with enormous screens. Weβre also working on improving access to your account and sideblogs.
Thatβs all for now, folks. For questions and suggestions, contactΒ SupportΒ using the βFeedbackβ category. Please select the βReport a bug or crashβ category on the support form for technical issues. And keep an eye out for more updates here on @changes.
At Tumblr, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the performance of the site. This means things like adding caching to heavily used codepaths, testing out new CDN configurations, or upgrading underlying software.
Recently, in a cross-team effort, we upgraded our full web server fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7. The whole upgrade was a fun project with some very cool results, so we wanted to share it with you.
Timeline
It all started as a hackday project in the fall of 2015. @oli and @trav got Tumblr running on one of the PHP 7 release candidates. At this point in time, quite a few PHP extensions did not have support for version 7 yet, but there were unofficial forks floating around with (very) experimental support. Nevertheless, it actually ran!
This spring, things were starting to get more stable and we decided it was time to start looking in to upgrading more closely. One of the first things we did was package the new version up so that installation would be easy and consistent. In parallel, we ported our in-house PHP extensions to the new version so everything would be ready and available from the get-go.
A small script was written that would upgrade (or downgrade) a developer’s server. Then, during the late spring and the summer, tests were run (more on this below), PHP package builds iterated on and performance measured and evaluated. As things stabilized we started roping in more developers to do their day-to-day work on PHP 7-enabled machines.
Finally, in the end of August we felt confident in our testing and rolled PHP 7 out to a small percentage of our production servers. Two weeks later, after incrementally ramping up, every server responding to user requests was updated!
Testing
When doing upgrades like this it’s of course very important to test everything to make sure that the code behaves in the same way, and we had a couple of approaches to this.
Phan. In this project, we used it to find code in our codebase that would be incompatible with PHP 7. It made it very easy to find the low-hanging fruit and fix those issues.
We also have a suite of unit and integration tests that helped a lot in identifying what wasn’t working the way it used to. And since normal development continued alongside this project, we needed to make sure no new code was added that wasn’t PHP 7-proof, so we set up our CI tasks to run all tests on both PHP 5 and PHP 7.
Results
So at the end of this rollout, what were the final results? Well, two things stand out as big improvements for us; performance and language features.
Performance
When we rolled PHP 7 out to the first batch of servers we obviously kept a very close eye at the various graphs we have to make sure things are running smoothly. As we mentioned above, we were looking for performance improvements, but the real-world result was striking. Almost immediately saw the latency drop by half, and the CPU load on the servers decrease at least 50%, often more. Not only were our servers serving pages twice as fast, they were doing it using half the amount of CPU resources.
These are graphs from one of the servers that handle our API. As you can see, the latency dropped to less than half, and the load average at peak is now lower than it’s previous lowest point!
Language features
PHP 7 also brings a lot of fun new features that can make the life of the developers at Tumblr a bit easier. Some highlights are:
Scalar type hints: PHP has historically been fairly poor for type safety, PHP 7 introduces scalar type hints which ensures values passed around conform to specific types (string, bool, int, float, etc).
Return type declarations: Now, with PHP 7, functions can have explicit return types that the language will enforce. This reduces the need for some boilerplate code and manually checking the return values from functions.
Anonymous classes: Much like anonymous functions (closures), anonymous classes are constructed at runtime and can simulate a class, conforming to interfaces and even extending other classes. These are great for utility objects like logging classes and useful in unit tests.
Various security & performance enhancements across the board.
Every so often, our Legal and Policy teams review Tumblr’s Community Guidelines to make sure they’re crisp, clear, and—most important of all—an accurate reflection of our community and its values.
Here’s a quick summary of some changes we’ve made (which you can see in detail over on GitHub):
Clarified our policy around promoting terrorism (don’t do it).
Reinforced our policy on posting non-consensual pornography (don’t do it).
Updated our harassment policy to reflect our improved block feature.
Added a dormancy policy to release URLs and archive long-term inactive blogs.
Have a look, and feel free to email [email protected] with any questions or concerns. Thank you!
10,000 years ago, before the advent of written language, the earliest app developers relied entirely on symbols and animation to convey a message to users. Of course, we still rely on non-lingual cues as shorthand for specific actions and to help people navigate the app, but in the last few hundred years we have also started to include copy.
Copy makes it possible to communicate complex concepts, but in its ubiquity it can get overlooked. Not so in the Tumblr app. Like those early app developers who tracked antelope migration patterns on cave walls and first used magnifying glasses to represent search, we take a very personal approach to copy. In this post we want to share a few places we’ve tried to lift Tumblr out of the drab standardization of many modern day apps.
Error messages
When we’re rewriting error messages we try to keep two things in mind: Make the error as comprehensible as possible and, if possible, suggest a solution. Here’s a long-retired string from our Android app:
<string name=“photo_capture_exception”>Unable to open camera to capture photo.</string>
This error occurs not because of anything the app did, but because—incredibly—on Android, you can delete your camera. But the user wouldn’t know that from the error. They’d just think the app sucks, give it a bad rating, and probably stop using Tumblr all together. That’s why it now reads:
Believe it or not, you don’t have a camera app installed.
The new version tells the user 1) why they can’t take a picture (no camera app), and 2) how to resolve it (go get one).