work in progress — do u have any intent to bring back the april fools...

Answer: Hey there, @automaticllamacycle!

So you’re right. There is currently no community-facing way that you can get your account back in the event it is deleted.

However, we are not too far away from having this technically feasible on our backend, and we don’t think it would take too much work to make it a reality. You’re right on this one—such a feature would be really nice to have, and we’re grateful you drew this to our attention.

Leave this with us—we will see what we can do. In the meantime, you can catch up with updates here at @wip or at @changes, should we have them.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. Happy weekend!

Hey there @exocomets!

This is an important question, and we couldn’t agree with you more, so we sent the crabs a letter in a bottle. They responded and said they’d love to come back, but they’re not sure when—they are enjoying their time on the island a lot!

This is understandably a popular question. Thanks also to @astrophysiciann for getting in touch—and never say never, people.

—Caroline (Tumblr Engineering)

Hello, @abigailpents!

We think that’s a great idea, and we’d love to do it. However, we’re afraid we’re focusing on improving other areas of the platform first, and don’t quite have the time or resources at the moment. We think this is a neat idea, however, and would advise you keep watch on @changes in the meantime.

Thanks for your question, and have a great day!

Love,

—Cyle (Tumblr Engineering)

Hello there, @ilovery.

We love giving you the ability to personalize things! And the good news is you already can do all of what you want in our mobile apps.

1. You can change the fonts. When on a paragraph, long-press the Aa icon and select another font.
2. Changing text color is also available when composing a post using the mobile app. All you have to do is highlight some text, and color pickers appear.
3. Color palettes are available on Android and iOS, too! Go to [Snowman] > ⚙️ > General Settings > Color Palette.

You can find a complete guide to using and formatting text in our Help Center guide.

We hope this helps, and thanks for your question. Keep them coming, folks.

—Eli (Tumblr Engineering).

Hello there, @writethewrongs.

We are looking at qualitative feedback like you’ve provided and quantitative feedback: like how many people have turned off the “Shorten long posts” dashboard setting, or if people are engaging more often with posts. We have considered allowing posts to expand in-place in apps as we do on web. But we are also considering making further improvements to the single-post view on mobile. Know we’ll continue to improve!

Right now, however, a project such as this would require a lot of time and work as it is not easy to expand in-place on mobile apps. As it is, it’s unlikely we will be able to implement this feature soon. 

Thanks for your suggestion, and we recommend you keep an eye on @changes for any updates.

Thanks for your question.

—Eli (Tumblr Engineering)

Hey there, @chr1s-v1tal0s.

Unfortunately, there are no currently plans to introduce new benefits at this time, including badges. However, we do already have an such an indicator on blog view already for Post+ and tipping if the user decides to turn it on.

Thanks for your question, and be sure to keep an eye on @changes for any updates. Have a great day!

Best,

Jon (Tumblr Marketing)

Hello there, @butterfingerrs.

Thanks for this! We’re planning on adding some more and will add omni to the list!

Cheers,

Loll (Tumblr Marketing)

Hey there, @charmedslayer.

We love this idea, too, and we would love to get to work on it someday. However, our hypothetical plate is pretty full right now, so while we can’t make any promises, please know that we’ve made a note of it. On our hypothetical wish list.

So we one day hope to hypothetically push the hypothetical peas to the side of our (you get the idea…) plate and make a little room for this project. In the meantime, keep an eye on @changes for updates.

Thanks for your question. It’s great feedback!

William (Tumblr Engineering).

Why hello, @tinymacaroni

Great news! Not only can you do this, but it is very straightforward.

On Android only, you can simply disable “Upload” in the Notifications menu in your phone settings, as displayed in the video below. This will stop notifications whenever you post, reblogs, etc.

On iOS, the system Notifications setting disables the whole notifications for a dedicated app. Or, to be more specific, you need to enable/disable the available notification settings in the Tumblr application Settings.

We hope this helps, and thanks, as always, for your feedback. And keep those questions rollin’!

Best,

—Adam and Omar (Tumblr Engineering)

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.