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.
Are there any plans to add search/organization options to the list of people we are following? Like the last time they posted or alphabetical.
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!
Hi dear Tumblr team I have a suggestion.
Have you ever thought about making comments likeable? To maybe show that you share the same opinion as someone or to simply show appreciation.
Maybe making it a bit special when the Creator of the post likes one of the comments.
I feel like this might be something that could be added
(*^^*)
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.
Sometimes, on the app, when I see a post from a blog that has been deleted, it will still show the date it was made, whereas on desktop the same post will not show the date. I find it very helpful to see the date on a post even if the blog doesn't exist anymore. Is there a reason Tumblr doesn't show the date when it apparently still has that information?
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.
Hi! Do y’all think making a spot where you can see all the posts you’ve followed/subscribed to would be a viable idea? Like how you can see your follower list, just a little spot where we could see what posts or master lists we’re subbed to?
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.
Hoping on Revamp Trending Page whereas this includes World Wide Trend Page and Locally Trend within the country/region, also Trending Tags must be have a Counts of Posted post within them
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.
Speaking of embeds, it's nice getting to embed Twitch clips in posts! But the clip doesn't show up at all on mobile, and there's not even a blank space or anything implying that there's an embedded video. If somebody embeds a clip with a caption on desktop, then on mobile it just looks like a text post of the caption. It's confusing!
Twitch livestream embeds show a link card on mobile as a fallback – any chance this could work for Twitch clips as well? Ideally I would love to see clips properly play on mobile, but I understand y'all are stretched pretty thin! Just something showing that there's more content in the post would make it a more consistent experience.
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.
when will we be able to submit polls while on desktop? surely that can't be an app exclusive feature forever!
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!
When I want to send a post to a person, the first account is the person who reblogged/made the post (understandable), the next 5 accounts are people I've talked to recently (great), but then the next accounts in the list are all randoms. If I want to send to the 6th most recent person I've talked to, I need to search their username, and they also kick the 5th person out again. Is there any chance the random accs can be replaced with more of the people I actually talk to?
Answer: Hey there, @evelili!
This is a great idea! We had played with the composition of that list many years ago, but haven’t had a chance to keep tweaking it. This makes sense to us, so we have doubled the number of blogs from recent conversations from five to ten.
We hope that makes the list more useful—and thanks for your question.
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.
I really appreciate that tag editing is a thing we have now… but coming from someone who uses this option lots: it can be a little overly fiddly to use. Specifically, the fact that at least on desktop clicking off a tag doesn't enter it and that if you accidentally try to move on to doing anything else without first making sure you have pressed enter (or comma IF it's the first time with the tag but not if you're editing it!! then comma will not work!!) it won't let you do anything else without telling you why until you go back, find the tag that hasn't been entered, click into it, and press enter (not comma! that doesn't work!) and then and only then can you continue to do things… maybe this could be fixed?
Answer: Hi, @b-a-n-d-e-r.
Thank you for your report! We are happy to let you know that we have started looking into it and believe it to be a bug, it transpires. We hope it will be fixed very soon, too, so keep an eye out for the usual channels, here at @wip or @changes, for any news. It shouldn't be too long, as we say.
Regarding the comma not working as “enter” when editing, we can confirm this is intended. Otherwise, you be unable to add any commas to your tags, which is not something we want you to stop doing!
Thanks for your question, and have a great day.
It would be good if the error message "welcome back! It's time to change your password" become optional, not mandatory.
When this message appears and if a person could not change the password, then that person cannot access the account. That is because the password change is mandatory.
It would be great if it becomes optional, and user can freely decide whether to change password or just skip it.
Thank you.
Answer: Hey there, @letsgirit!
Password resets like this are very important for account safety here on Tumblr (and plenty of other sites!) and are often prompted for very important reasons.
However, if you’re ever not able to get that password reset working, we do have an account recovery process to help as noted here in this handy Help Center article. We hope this helps, and thanks for getting in touch.
can we at least get to keep seeing how many times we booped/were booped even if those numbers can't change?
Answer: Hello, @bhawk-goose!
So it was indeed a fun temporary feature, perhaps the most fun of temporary features. But it’s a no, for now, as it would require some additional work to make it a lasting feature—which is work we cannot commit to anytime soon.
But, as we said in a recent answer, it is not inconceivable that the boops will be back in some form in the future. Eyes peeled, y’all.
hello, i would like all my posts to stay on my “front page”, I don’t want them to go to the archive. is it possible to fix that? it’s for stesofolio.tumblr.com. I use it as a portfolio and want it to be an endless feed of posts.
Answer: Hey there @stesosongs!
We must start by saying that we are not entirely sure what you mean here, and so we have reached out to you directly to clarify.
However, we wonder if this may be a bug with the custom theme you are using—it seems to stop after loading a certain number of posts. We can’t fix that, we are sorry to say, so you’d have to reach out to the theme developer, which you can find here. We hope this helps!
It'd be great if we can check what we posted years ago everyday, like "on this day" or "memories". Are you planning on implementing this soon? ❤️
Answer: Hi, @puregrief!
Fun story: we tried this! A couple of times, actually. One of them is still up that you can see today: the @memories blog on Tumblr was an April Fools prank many years ago, and its posts are customized based on who’s viewing it (you!), and it has some fun things like this.
Another time, we had a thing that would show you a post of yours from long ago with a header like “Blast from the past!”—it was fun for only a handful of people… but most others who saw it really did not like it, and let us know, so we removed it.
There are no plans to bring it back at present. But thank you for getting in touch, and keep the questions coming y'all.
Hi! I was wondering if it'd be possible to access full posts even after the original was deleted? What I mean is if a post is reblogged but there's a keep reading add in it then what's under the divider is lost if the original is gone. From what (little) I understand this cut creates a sort of front for the original with a short and full version being kinda separate things. Instead of this maybe the shorten long posts setting could be the base of this function? Idk, I just wanna see old posts 😭
Answer: Hey, @dreamlandcreations!
Unfortunately, we cannot make this happen. Once a post is deleted, we don’t support a way to then un-delete it. Even if we could, that would also violate the original poster’s trust. And nobody wants that.
We are sorry it is a no here, but thanks for your question. Keep 'em coming, y'all.
Will there at any point be an option for mass deleting likes, either all at once or by date or tags? I am aware there's an outside computer extension that can be used for this, but as someone who only logs in on my phone, I was wondering about through the mobile app.
Answer: Hello, @fandom--collector!
There are no plans to include a function to mass-unlike posts, sorry. But there are some small workarounds, however—your best bet is a third-party extension or writing a tool that uses our API! We hope this might be of some use.
Thanks for your question, and have a lovely day.
