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.
Is it possible for you to explain why when I search for something, possible communities are above users?
Answer: Hello, @fandomsareforlife!
Thanks for noticing! We can tell you this is just a little experiment we are working on. We’re trying to see if people seeking Communities is more useful than people seeking other individuals—you’ll find any updates over at @changes.
There are a lot of things coming for Communities. It is now in a kind of open beta with tens of thousands of participants, and we’ve been sharing roadmap updates and more in the Feedback community, for example—don’t miss it! You can find out more about this at the Help Center right here.
We hope you enjoy Communities. Thanks for your question! Keep ’em coming, folks.
will patio ever become a free feature, since the disclaimer on the top of the help article says "at this time"?
Answer: Hi, @yppngmtt!
Great question. Maybe, just maybe.
Patio has found a good niche of usage in Premium, and we’ve been very glad to see it! However, we’re still making little tweaks here and there to make it more useful for more people—which is not to say that it is off the table, only that it’s not going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. As and when we do have updates for you, you’ll find news here or over at @changes.
Thanks for the question. Keep ’em coming, folks.
Hi, I was wondering if it would be possible to separate more blogs coming from the same mail. Like on instagram where two accounts from the same person can have different subscription and likes.
I do not find practical how the main blog has the control of the likes and subscriptions. Especially when having two blogs mean that they're for different purpose.
I hope my request is clear enough, if it isn't, I would be happy to explain in more details.
Thank you in advance and have a great day
Answer: Hi, @charlie-theidiot!
Well, what are the chances?
It sounds like you’re describing a current project of ours: “Identities”! It’s something we’d like to do, and very much intend to do. Only we have to level with you folks: it’s a big, big project, and we don’t have the bandwidth for it right now, particularly with Communities taking so much time and resources.
Thanks for your question. Hopefully, it won’t be too long until we’ve got some news to share. We’ll keep you posted!
hey wip, any shot we could get more post privacy options? currently both visibility and interactability are all or nothing and I would love to have more control over it.
some examples: unlisted (doesnt show up in feeds or search), followers only, mutuals only, mentioned users only.
tumblr is pretty good with granular privacy options and self moderation tools but this would go a long way
Answer: Hey, @breadcattt!
Good question. It can be said for sure that we do want to take a pass at all of our privacy options across blogs, posts, and now Communities, but it’s some way away yet, unfortunately.
Very few people use these options, in the scheme of things. While that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant, they can be very confusing. We want not just to employ some new options but also redesign and rethink the existing ones more holistically. All of that will take time, bandwidth, and resources—and we just haven’t had time for it yet.
We appreciate the question and hope to tackle this before too long, however. You can find any news here or at @changes.
Thanks for your question!
What changes are you expecting to be made to Communities before they are officially released and done?
Answer: Hey there, @lunaeclipse1057-ao3!
First of all, we don’t have any real definition for being “done” with Communities! There is a long, long way to go, so we’ve been thinking in terms of milestones and releases.
We had a limited alpha release with only dozens of participants and then a closed beta with hundreds of participants—and we’re now in a kind of open beta with many tens of thousands of participants. We are still working to open the floodgates one bit at a time and get hundreds of thousands of participants.
But there are many millions of people on Tumblr. So you could say that we will consider the Communities feature released in a more official fashion, no longer “beta”, when we’ve built everything out in the native mobile apps.
There are a lot of things coming for Communities. We’ve been sharing roadmap updates and more in the Communities Feedback community, for example—the latest is here! Don’t miss it.
Thanks for your question! We are glad for your interest in Communities—we hope you like it.
ICYMI...
After Tumblr's backend migration to Wordpress, will the entire content of all half of billion blogs will be deleted??
Answer: Hi, @garotaviciada!
It’s important to note here that this is just the engine running the site, and there will be no changes to the front-end. So no—we’re not deleting content. All of Tumblr’s blogs, and the content on them, will continue to be served, both at the blog address and in the apps. There will just be different tech running under the hood.
Perhaps the simplest way to say so is that, besides a bug or two here or there, how you know and use Tumblr will not change at all. We hope this helps clarify things.
ICYMI...
Any chance of DM/chat history being made available via the API? Or otherwise made easier to view and download? I chat frequently with some of my mutuals, but there's no practical way to look at recent chat history, and no way at all to see anything past the last hundred or so messages (which might be less than a day's worth of chatting!).
Answer: Hey, @fallintosanity!
We’re afraid to say this is one of those that, as nice as it would be to have, is not something we can prioritize at this moment. That said, there is an option.
While there are no plans to open up third-party API access to direct messages, a copy of all of your conversations comes with your blog export! We would recommend this as the best way around it, for now, and hope this helps.
Thanks for your question! Keep them coming, folks.
Just a suggestion - in addition to the badges, why not allow users to pay for 'widget' type things e.g. a view counter for your blog? Or more badges which have functions?
Answer: Hi there, @keepthethorns!
Short and, hopefully, sweet answer for you: that’s a great idea!
As it happens, we are planning to revisit the suite of badges and TumblrMart items sometime in the next year, so stay tuned. Your feedback will be well worth coming back to!
I'm VERY excited about the upcoming communities. Tumblr has always been very vacuous and shallow with little to no interaction. Drive-by follows and likes do nothing to build a community and the messaging utility is almost useless. I'd like to suggest that you implement categories such as we had waaaay back in Geocities (THAT shows my age!) to make it easier to find similar interests. 'Fashion Avenue' (for example) was heavily populated by folks who loved fashion.
Answer: Hey, @vintageweddingdresses!
As it happens, we’ve had just the same idea on this one. Great minds, and all that.
We are on the same page about categories, as you describe them here, and we want to do basically that. Same deal. Same energy. Stay tuned—with a bit of luck, it’s coming soon!
Communities is now in a kind of open beta with many tens of thousands of participants. You can find out more at the Help Center right here.
Thanks for your question! Keep 'em coming, people.
Will there a feature that lets us look at posts that were made in a certain year under a certain tag. In the search bar? Like how when you go into the archive of someone’s blog and you see all the posts they made in a month. Or year. I’m trying to find a certain post under a certain tag but can’t find it when I go into the search bar because there’s only a certain timeline we can search. Like would it be possible to see posts from 2016 or even 2013?
Answer: Hey, @jadeloverxd!
We’d love to include posts older than 2017, but it comes at a cost.
Cataloging the first 10 years of Tumblr’s life with our new search infrastructure will eat up a lot of our time and space, with diminishing returns. We know most people don’t access posts that old, even when we did support going back to that time. Going back before 2015 would actually require us to do a lot of difficult digging, as we weren’t properly indexing posts before that time in the first place.
Instead, we’re trying to focus our current efforts on improving searching within blogs (which we’ve heard a lot of feedback about!) and reducing the amount of spam and otherwise bad content for the things most people are searching around Tumblr for.
We hope this helps clarify things. If we have any updates, you’ll be the first to know.
Add community notes to Tumblr. I know it's a twitter thing, but more chaos for the chaos website :3
Answer: Hey there, @specialkindofidiot!
Funnily enough, we’ve had the exact same thought. And, as it happens, we now have some folks who worked on Community Notes on Twitter/X working at Tumblr!
We can say that we want to do this kind of thing eventually, but can’t say it’s clear when we’ll be able to get to it. Perhaps it’s something that could tie into Communities later down the line.
In any case, we will keep you posted here. You know the drill: here, or at @changes. Thanks for your question, and keep them coming, folks!
After Tumblr's backend migration to Wordpress, will the entire content of all half of billion blogs will be deleted??
Answer: Hi, @garotaviciada!
It’s important to note here that this is just the engine running the site, and there will be no changes to the front-end. So no—we’re not deleting content. All of Tumblr’s blogs, and the content on them, will continue to be served, both at the blog address and in the apps. There will just be different tech running under the hood.
Perhaps the simplest way to say so is that, besides a bug or two here or there, how you know and use Tumblr will not change at all. We hope this helps clarify things.
When we hit “smash cache” would it be possible to show how much we are clearing please?
Also, unrelated, any chance a “mute blog” feature might be added. Sometimes one just wants to temporarily mute a beloved mutual but not unfollow. Thank you!
Answer: Hey there @fluffykittensox!
Let us answer this in two parts.
When we hit “smash cache” would it be possible to show how much we are clearing please?
This already works that way on Android, and it looks possible on iOS. We will continue working on this and get back to you with updates as and when we have them.
Also, unrelated, any chance a “mute blog” feature might be added. Sometimes one just wants to temporarily mute a beloved mutual but not unfollow.
We’ve heard this one quite a lot! The answer, for now, is unfortunately still the same: we’d want to understand this problem a bit better before adding such an option option anywhere. That may seem like the right solution, but maybe not. It’d also add yet more complexity to our already complex set of filtering and muting options, and we’re hesitant to add more complexity there.
Thank you for your questions. Keep ’em coming, people!
hey guys!
I saw a release from Automattic that said something about migrating Tumblr's backend to Wordpress for easier updates and better infrastructure. do you guys have more info on how that'll work?
also, I saw one of your recent posts about allowing more features for sideblogs, which is great. but is there a plan to allow a user to change which blog is their primary? I know I'm not the only person who no longer uses their primary blog, and it would be nice to switch functionality to the blog that I use more often.
thanks so much!
Answer: Hey there, @psycho-magnotheric-slime!
To answer your first question, we answered a very similar question very recently.
We’re in the planning and prototyping phase right now, so we don’t have a lot of details to share. But we will share our plans and progress as it becomes clearer.
Some of the pieces we’re discussing are:
To answer your second, we can say that we have looked into this several times in the past, but it is a tricky problem that requires some careful work. There are a lot of assumptions baked into Tumblr about how primary and secondary blogs work, and it would be particularly difficult to switch them around. It’s also not something we’ve had a chance to prioritize, in recent times.
We should also use the opportunity to clarify that, besides a bug or two here or there, how you know and use Tumblr will not change!
We hope this helps. Have a great day!
Hello there. I remember when we could find the oldest posts in a specific tag using the url https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/thetagiwanttosearch?before=timestamp. Today, when browsing a tag, the url shows ?page=number. Unfortunately, entering the url with a specific page number only redirects to the first posts in the tag. Is there a way to (1) reach a specific date in a tag other than browsing manually until I get to that date? (2) browse forward from the oldest posts in a tag? (3) and most importantly pick up where I left off if my browsing session is interrupted?
Answer: Hi, @somewhatavidreader!
We do not support a “before” URL param on tagged pages, though we do in some other places, like the “Following” dashboard. This is possibly what you are remembering.
But now for some good news—we are in the process of adding better ways of filtering search results. We recently added a “year” and a “date” operator, that lets you target a specific year and even date! You can try this out by typing #cats date:2023-10-31 into the search box to get results for a tag or search term filtered to a particular day.
We hope this helps! Thanks for your question, and keep 'em coming, folks.
why arent groupchats a thing anymore?
Answer: Hello @smushedmuffin!
We were very excited about bringing native group chats to Tumblr. Unfortunately, however, not enough people ended up using them for us to feel it was worth keeping and maintaining as a feature.
Every time we build a significant new feature like that, one that consumes a lot of time and bandwidth, we try to measure whether the juice was worth the squeeze, so to speak. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out. If we kept it around, it would be yet another thing in the big pile of things we (a pretty small team) need to maintain. It is for these reasons and more that it often makes sense to just let it go. That’s not to say we are not sad to see it go, of course.
That said, while it’s more like a “slow” group chat than like our previous attempt at group chats, we are introducing a little feature called Communities to let people get together and talk in a shared space. You can find out more at the Help Center.
Thanks for your question. Keep ’em coming!
