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.
Boops are the best ever, I love them so thank you so much! Kudos to everyone who worked on it, esp. the paw animations are delightful
& not to sound cold and calculating, but I'm guessing since they increase engagement quite a bit, even if just for a short while - have you thought having random old-aprils-fools-events repeated once or twice throughout the year? Both for people who weren't there to experience them, and to bring a burst of joy on more occasions than like, 1st April, 5th November (...and 15th March, etc)
Answer: Hi there, @agapi-kalyptei!
At this time the answer is similar to the many of you folks asking, nay, pleading, to bring back the Boops. It will have to be no for now, but we also have to thank you heartily for all of your enthusiasm.
A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?
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.
Hiya!! I know this was brought up in another answer a little while ago, but I thought the idea of creating "custom dashes" for different kinds of things you follow was really fun and helpful!! Is there any possibility of something like that getting rolled out on a larger scale? (Thank you so much!! 😊)
Answer: Hey, @novatheastropirate!
So we can say that we’re looking into it as a possible future feature of Patio, since that has been successful. We should also add that it is more than likely that we’ll work on that when we start tackling a later version of Patio, but it’s certainly on our wish list and we are glad it’s on yours too.
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.
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.
Know how when we click a tag, it opens a page for all instances of said tag, and on that page is an option to follow it; would it be possible to have a similar option to block it from the same place?
It would make blocking a tag a lot simpler, especially since sometimes it’s necessary to remember whatever complicated spelling the tag has (on mobile I can’t c/p a tag, idk about desktop) while navigating several steps to the block menu, or for blocking several similar tags in a row, such as 37 versions of #(whatever new show) spoilers is the word of the day 😂
I just think it would make sense that clicking on someone’s tag, exactly as they wrote it, and being able to block it from there would be *incredibly* useful, and if blocking tags was simple, straightforward, visible, and readily available, then more people might use it effectively. How feasible is that, and how likely?
Answer: Hi, @trudemaethien!
We are sorry to say that while it would indeed be nice to have this, and there are plenty of us on the team who would love to see it, we can't make it a priority right now. It is also unclear when we’d get around to it, but if there are any updates here, @wip or @changes is the place you'll find 'em.
Thanks for your question. We appreciate submissions such as these, and fingers crossed!
hello! please feel free to ignore this, I don’t know if it’s the right place to ask, I just feel very curious. 🥴
I was wondering, would you ever consider in making country flags badges? like for everyone to use a badge of their country, if they want. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself properly nor if it’s do-able.
thank you very much, have a very pleasant day! ♡
Answer: Hi there @madame-fear!
We have considered it, as luck would have it! It would just be a lot of badges if we made them individually. We would have to make it a new kind of badge that can be more configurable than we’ve done before and while it is very possible, we just haven’t had time to do it yet.
Thank you for the idea—we will be sure to keep you posted here.
Boop! I have a question for you, that I have asked before but have never seen addressed, so apologies for bothering you about this again:
Will the ability to use the archive come to the IOS app at all in the future? I really like having access to it in order to create master posts and look at old posts. Thank you in advance!
Answer: Hey there, @fandomsareforlife!
Maybe someday! Sorry, we understand this is not the answer anyone wants, and while we can say we like this idea, we can’t promise much more beyond that right now.
Thanks for your question, and please do keep ‘em coming. And don’t forget, you can catch bi-weekly updates for new features, and for bugs we’ve resolved, at @changes.
Hello! Please restore the ability to insert COUB videos. It worked perfectly until February 2024.
Answer: Hello, @stillnotspamdog!
With regard to your question in question.
We do actually support COUB, as luck would have it. But it’s very possible something changed on their end that broke our ability to embed their content. How we handle their embeds, on our side, hasn’t changed in several years. One of our engineers would need to dig in on this more, but with time and resources stretched a little thin at the moment, we cannot say for sure when this might be.
Leave this with us. If we have news here, you’ll be the first to know!
Would it be possible to get rid of the prompt to add tags when making a new post. I think it's actually a very good feature to have when someone first joins the site, because it shows them how to use tags here, but I've been here for over a decade. I know how to use tags, I just purposely don't use them on most of my posts, so it's just more of an annoyance than it is helpful.
Answer: Hi there, @gaelic-galpal!
Great question. As it happens, we are actually looking at changing the frequency of this potentially overindulgent prompt. It has proven to be somewhat effective, which is very useful to the Tumblr ecosystem, but it can be a bit much. Let’s see what we can do here. The more tagging, the better!
Updates as and when we’ve got ’em will of course come via @changes.
I love that I can use the small text option to make just part of my post small- I really wish the big text at least or all of the other text options allowed me to do the same, to only change certain words or phrases, rather than all or nothing
Answer: Hey there, @b-a-n-d-e-r!
A little good news and a little bad news here. First, the good: we would love to do this too, as luck would have it. Consider it duly noted on our proverbial to-do list.
It must be said, however, that it is not clear as and when we might get the chance to do so. The said to-do list is long, and bandwidth is limited. Should we make progress, you can find out here or at @changes.
I recently started getting notifications that say “blank just posted for the first time in a while!” And it’s always been like, a week, since their last post. Most of the blogs I follow are artists, and this is a perfectly normal posting schedule. How can I turn this annoying notification off? Or can we at least extend the time to like, 6 months?
Answer: Hello, @iguanodonwildman!
We are very glad to answer this, and not least because this is something we have noticed ourselves.
The first thing to say here is this: to turn off this type of notification you can toggle the “Recent updates” notification settings in the app, and this will go away.
But we have actually looked into this ourselves and found the bug responsible. We can confirm that we have now rolled back the change for the activity items—so the bug is fixed, and that toggle is what controls those particular notifications.
And thanks also to @coffeecasuality11, who got in touch with the same question. We hope this will be good news for you folks.
why would overlays be shown for posts with filtered tags? if tags are filtered, we don't want to see them. instead now we have to scroll through tons of filtered posts for no reason, clogging up our tags and defeating the entire point. can we at least have the option to get rid of the overlays? thanks for reading this,
Answer: Hey, @vintacha!
It's a long story, so we'll make it short: there are indeed changes like this we would love to make, and hope to, when we have the bandwidth.
But these are important changes, so we want to make them carefully, and not just throw yet more options into an already-confusing mix. If—and it is an if, at present—we get a chance to take a pass at improving our filtering options, it will probably be more like our community label options, where each one has show, overlay, and skip options.
Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming y’all.
Can we keep the boops?
Answer: Hi there, @azure-prince! Boop.
Was it really two weeks ago today that Boopageddon was unleashed upon the dashboard?
At this time the answer will have to be no, but we also have to thank you heartily for all of your enthusiasm. That is not all we can say, of course: we will add a little never say never to keep you all on your toes.
Thanks also to @tulpafcker, @flust3rdyke, @alexdoestheart, and more. Boops to you all.
Any updates on Communities? I have so many potential users for this feature and want to get going! 😊
Answer: Hi, @ktempestbradford!
Well, what are the chances? We have quite the update for you, and you can find it right here over at @labs. Happy reading!
I would love the option to change our vote in polls.
I follow things like ‘am i the asshole’, where sometimes we get updates that change the whole story, so changing my vote to reflect that would be helpful.
There are times when I’ve accidentally voted while scrolling, so even having a short delay where you can change your vote before seeing the results would help.
Answer: Hey there, @enby-ernhardt!
As it happens, someone had a similar question in the not-too-distant past, and we answered it back here. Our stance has not changed, sadly. This is democracy manifest, after all. Choose wisely.
Thanks for your question, and have a good day.
I swear a toggle for “contains commercial content” while editing a post. What’s that about?
Answer: Hi, @iguanodonwildman!
We are glad you asked. The answer, in short, is that the toggle is there to comply with the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA). It simply adds a “Commercial Content” banner to the post and does not affect your post’s visibility or ranking on Tumblr.
There is a handy Help Center article with more info, which you can find right here.
Thanks for your question!
