work in progress — When I want to send a post to a person, the first...

Answer: Hey there, @bregee13!

We have something of a multi-pronged answer for you here. You can make polls on web right now, as it happens:

However, if you mean adding a poll to a submission sent to another blog’s inbox, we’re sorry to say there is no way to do this on web yet. The submission form on web is built with very old legacy code, which was never meant to be extensible for new content types, such as Polls. While we would like to rebuild it to be compatible with all content types, the fact is that submissions are one of the least-used features on Tumblr, and we’ve only got so much room on our immediate roadmap. 

But, just because we have bigger fish to fry today doesn’t mean we aren’t keenly aware of this feature gap! When we are able to justify giving it some attention, we’ll let you know, pronto.

Thanks for getting in touch!

Answer: Hello, @otwol!

We are currently working on how we detect trending topics and tags, as it happens! And we hope to have this work wrapped up in the next few months. 

As part of other work, we have also discussed the possibility of changing how we source posts from Trending. These are currently posts that might have nothing to do with the trending topics. We have a different source that surfaces popular posts in trending topics, doing a round-robin to cover all of them. This should not be too tricky to look at, but we haven’t prioritized this yet.

There was also a Hackday project some years ago on localized trending, and we even ran several A/B tests. They didn’t show much impact, so this feature was disabled.

But as you say, it would be interesting to iterate on the trending page, and A/B test it against logged-out traffic to see if we can improve registrations. Thanks for your question here. We will look into it and get back to you with news.

Answer: Hi there, @aconitum-nerium!

So, we must assume here that you are referring to being subscribed for notifications when new reblogs and replies come in. This would be nice, for sure, but it's very unlikely at present. It's not clear where we’d put it, for one thing, or indeed when we would have a chance to build it. 

We're sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but keep your questions coming folks. 

Answer: Hey there, @skysometric.

This sounded like a bug to us. It shouldn’t actually be skipped, and there should have been a link card showing instead, like you say here. 

We looked into it and, lo and behold, our hypothesis was right. Fortunately we got to work promptly and fixed this bug and everything should be working spick and span, as was mentioned in our recent @changes update. And there should now actually be a video embed now, not a link card. We hope this comes as good news!

Thanks for your question, and have a lovely day.

Answer: Hi there, @heartandlungs!

This is a good question, and the easiest answer would be consistency. With the current footer design, something really has to live there, if only to balance things out. So it might as well be the same component which is, in this case, “0 notes.” We appreciate that this can come across as a little mean—even if that is not at all the intention. 

But you certainly have a point. It performs no functional purpose and simply highlights the fact the post has no engagement, which is not what anyone wants to see. There are perhaps some other alternatives here, so we will take this back to the drawing board and see what can be done.

There’s something to consider with this, so thank you for your question. As and when we have updates for you, you know where to find them—here at @wip or over at @changes.

Answer: Hey, @fourcheesecalzone!

First, a long story short. We didn’t start recording this timestamp in reblog trails until ~3 years ago, so any reblogs from before that time may not have the information in the trail. We do our best to “backfill” the timestamp, but in cases where the post or blog was deleted, we don’t have anything to look up, so we can’t backfill it.

And now a little longer version. Reblogs store copies of the previous items in the reblog trail. So if I make a post, and then you reblog it, your reblog has a copy of my post content. This leads to some fun things: like if I edit my post, your reblog of it won’t be updated, and if someone clicks the original post in your reblog, they’ll see a new post. Fun! We did this to increase the performance of the whole platform. It means we don’t have to look up every post in the reblog trail, which can be dozens to hundreds of posts long.

Unfortunately, it also means things like what you’re describing can happen. If we make a change to what we’re storing in the reblog trail (like we did with NPF in ~2017), it’s incredibly difficult for us to update the tens of billions of posts on Tumblr. Recording timestamps in reblog trails is a very similar problem. It would take us years to go through each reblog across Tumblr to update them, and we don’t feel like it’s that big of a deal for it to be sometimes missing.

Thanks for getting in touch, and we hope this clarifies things.

Answer: Hey there, @fourcheesecalzone!

This is a good question. Let us start by saying that it is very unlikely we’ll do this anytime soon. There simply isn’t the bandwidth on our side to be taking on such a project right now. We are sorry to be the bearers of bad news—but then that’s not quite all. 

As luck would have it, there is a public demo example way of using the API to do just what you ask here. We like to think this is a more than adequate workaround, and hope this helps. 

Thank you for your question. Keep ’em coming, folks!

Answer: Hello, @kurt-dontcry!

We like this idea. We like this idea a lot, even.

We like it so much, in fact, we have already given ample consideration and would love to do it. First, though, we’re working on making replies "threadable,“ so you can respond to specific comments. After we get that rolled out, we may come back to the idea of being able to like or react to specific comments in the notes—and certainly hope to bring this one to fruition.

Thanks for your question, and fingers crossed here. Have a good day.

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!

Answer: Hey there, @razbb!

Good news! We already have a guide for keyboard shortcuts built into the dashboard, as luck would have it. You can access it by clicking the little floating keyboard icon in the bottom-right, as in these screenshots:

But as you point out, there is no keyboard shortcut for opening the keyboard shortcut guide. This seems like an oversight to us, so we will get to work on this as fast as we can. It should be easy enough to add!

We also have various mentions of other features and how to make use of them in the Help Center—we think this article, Lesser-Known Features, would be ideal for your question.  

We hope this all helps, and thanks for getting in touch! Keep ‘em coming, folks.