3 ms·

This is fascinating. Are there any other crazy "wtf, how has this site not died yet" stories from the inside?

Bartweiss 8y ago
There's an awful lot of less-critical stuff that users have tracked down themselves. A few random highlights: - The mobile and desktop sites are completely separate products with vastly different behavior. Some privacy features (relevant to both) can only be accessed on one, some on the other. Tags are rendered in all-lowercase on mobile, but as written on desktop. Block quotes on desktop render as enlarged-font cursive on mobile, for some awful reason. - Tumblr support(s/ed) font coloring, with no documentation of that fact. You enable it by using the HTML editor and picking among color tags with Friends-themed names like "Monica Pizazz Orange". Oh, and the preview feature won't honor the tags, but actually posting will. - NSFW content is flagged even in drafts, but if that content is reviewed and approved, it's automatically posted publicly, not returned to drafts where it started. - Tumblr's desktop sign up page use(s/d) semi-random images from the site as backgrounds. Yes, they did serve cartoon porn to people trying to make accounts. - Certain posts were impossible to view. Tumblr accounts can have their own themed pages, or simply be popup sidebars over the main news feed. Tumblr "read more" content hiders took users from the news feed to the poster's account - if that account was in popup format, a readmore opened from the wrong location would simply force a circular redirect. - All Tumblr links are actually pushed through a site-specific forwarding system to track users. As a result, Twitter and many other sites are inaccessible because they view all link clicks as bot traffic from a "single source".
- nightpool 8y ago
  your info is somewhat put of daye. aside from #1, these are all bugs that have been fixed. #2 was only before the feature was officially launched. #3 was fixed within a few days. #4 wasn't a bug, serving artistic nudity was intentional and part of tumblrs brand (just like an art museum would). #5 was a bug for a while and it sucked. I've never heard of #6 being an issue—its true that they use a link tracking system but I've never heard of it causing "bot traffic" issues, respectfully, that sounds like bullshit—while I hate it for privacy reasons, lots of sites use link tracking, like Google and Facebook.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    I agree that most of these bugs are old; I figured the question included historical stuff, and I have a better knowledge of Tumblr's old bugs than the its new ones. It looks like I was simply wrong on #2, thank you; I remembered it as something that had been around for ages but was noticed, then publicized. If it was found before a planned announcement, that's different. #3 was fixed within a few days, but frankly I think "posting people's drafts with no warning" is a "damage done" thing, the same as an email client sending drafts to all listed recipients. There are reasons like the "private post" option that you would draft something and never openly publish it, and even beyond that it's reason to draft anything you might not want to publish as-is offline instead of in the site's draft feature. #6 is complained about by plenty of other people, and happens to me perhaps 90% of the time. I realize I missed one thing: it's mobile-only. Opening a Twitter link on mobile produces a "you're rate-limited" blocking page which sticks around even if you try again later, but choosing "open in Chrome" to escape the Tumblr app immediately solves the problem. I haven't seen comparable behavior in any other app where I've followed Twitter links. Mobile-specific implies it's not purely the link tracking, granted, but it's very much a real Tumblr-specific issue.

There's an awful lot of less-critical stuff that users have tracked down themselves. A few random highlights: - The mobile and desktop sites are completely separate products with vastly different behavior. Some privacy features (relevant to both) can only be accessed on one, some on the other. Tags are rendered in all-lowercase on mobile, but as written on desktop. Block quotes on desktop render as enlarged-font cursive on mobile, for some awful reason. - Tumblr support(s/ed) font coloring, with no documentation of that fact. You enable it by using the HTML editor and picking among color tags with Friends-themed names like "Monica Pizazz Orange". Oh, and the preview feature won't honor the tags, but actually posting will. - NSFW content is flagged even in drafts, but if that content is reviewed and approved, it's automatically posted publicly, not returned to drafts where it started. - Tumblr's desktop sign up page use(s/d) semi-random images from the site as backgrounds. Yes, they did serve cartoon porn to people trying to make accounts. - Certain posts were impossible to view. Tumblr accounts can have their own themed pages, or simply be popup sidebars over the main news feed. Tumblr "read more" content hiders took users from the news feed to the poster's account - if that account was in popup format, a readmore opened from the wrong location would simply force a circular redirect. - All Tumblr links are actually pushed through a site-specific forwarding system to track users. As a result, Twitter and many other sites are inaccessible because they view all link clicks as bot traffic from a "single source".

nightpool 8y ago
your info is somewhat put of daye. aside from #1, these are all bugs that have been fixed. #2 was only before the feature was officially launched. #3 was fixed within a few days. #4 wasn't a bug, serving artistic nudity was intentional and part of tumblrs brand (just like an art museum would). #5 was a bug for a while and it sucked. I've never heard of #6 being an issue—its true that they use a link tracking system but I've never heard of it causing "bot traffic" issues, respectfully, that sounds like bullshit—while I hate it for privacy reasons, lots of sites use link tracking, like Google and Facebook.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I agree that most of these bugs are old; I figured the question included historical stuff, and I have a better knowledge of Tumblr's old bugs than the its new ones. It looks like I was simply wrong on #2, thank you; I remembered it as something that had been around for ages but was noticed, then publicized. If it was found before a planned announcement, that's different. #3 was fixed within a few days, but frankly I think "posting people's drafts with no warning" is a "damage done" thing, the same as an email client sending drafts to all listed recipients. There are reasons like the "private post" option that you would draft something and never openly publish it, and even beyond that it's reason to draft anything you might not want to publish as-is offline instead of in the site's draft feature. #6 is complained about by plenty of other people, and happens to me perhaps 90% of the time. I realize I missed one thing: it's mobile-only. Opening a Twitter link on mobile produces a "you're rate-limited" blocking page which sticks around even if you try again later, but choosing "open in Chrome" to escape the Tumblr app immediately solves the problem. I haven't seen comparable behavior in any other app where I've followed Twitter links. Mobile-specific implies it's not purely the link tracking, granted, but it's very much a real Tumblr-specific issue.