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.
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.
Hi wip,
I have a few questions:
I know that blogpacks are still very experimental, but it would be very nice to get pagination (to allow going back a day or many days), and a multi-column view. Are there any plans to expand blogpacks soon?
Also do you have any updates to share on patio?
Answer: Hi there, @sapphicpond!
An answer for you, short and relatively sweet. We do indeed have plans, and big plans, too. But none in the near term—we are all-in on Communities right now.
As and when we do have news on the aforementioned plans for Collections/BlogPacks and Patio, you can catch it on our @changes blog. So do be sure to follow along there. In the meantime, thank you for your question, and have a great week!
Hi there! So in private messages my friend tends to send me like 10 posts at once, and right now there is no option to reply to those messages individually. For example in messenger etc if you swipe right (or right click) you can immediately reply to that specific post/message. I was wondering if you guys had any plans on incorporating that or if you'd be willing to. Thanks in advance! 😘
Answer: Hey, @serendipityxing!
Unfortunately, we don’t have any plans on adding that kind of functionality to direct messaging.
But’s it not all bad news—far from it. It sounds like what you’re doing could be much better served by Communities! Sharing posts with friends in a space where you can all comment on them is one of the reasons we’re building it, and we think it would suit you down to the ground. Like a glove, even.
Thanks for getting in touch, and we hope you all enjoy Communities. Give it a whirl sometime.
When it comes to private communities and inviting blogs to join, what's the reason for the "Can't invite the blog yet, sorry" message, and is there a way around that at this time?
Also, with private communities, I would like to suggest that there should be a tiny preview available to non-members, with at least the title, cover image, and the "about this community" section with a "request to join" button, as invitations are also getting lost in peoples' notifications.
Answer: Hey, @iliusolympios!
A two-part question requires a two-part answer. To address your first point, we can say that not all blogs can join communities yet. But we are currently working on that—and hope to have more news for you soon, on that point.
Regarding private communities, that’s good feedback, and we are grateful you raised it. Maybe we can make it a toggle whether or not private communities have some kind of “preview” or not—in any case, leave this with us, and we will see what we can do.
Thanks for your feedback. We appreciate it and hope to get back to you with updates soon!
Are there plans to make communities accessible in the mobile app? I am not currently in any communities, and when I click on a link to one it seems to open in the in-app browser. I have an idea for a community I might like to create, but I'm 100% mobile these days. What is the timeline on adding communities access to the app?
Answer: Hello, @maplerosekisses!
There is a new “Communities” tab that gets added to the nav bar in the apps, once you’re invited to a community. Right now, however, we are intentionally limiting how many people have it because we’re still actively building it, and it’s not ready for everyone to have it yet.
It will be there for everyone someday soon, though. And we like to think this won’t be too long, which includes the mobile app too, we are glad to say. Once it is, you will be the first to know.
Thanks for your question, and keep them coming—we can’t wait to let Communities into the world!
Hello there! So I just made a community and wanted to ask a couple questions.
Answer: Hi there, @lovelyeevee234!
Some great questions here. Let us answer them one by one.
How will I be able to let people see my community during this beta test and in the future?
Right now, communities aren’t listed anywhere. They’re invite-only and “hidden” by design to keep the test somewhat constrained. But in the future, there will be rich discovery experiences just like we have for posts and blogs on Tumblr today! We’re building this stuff as quickly as we can.
Will the cap be removed or be severely bumped up once the beta test is done?
Our hope is to remove the cap entirely. The cap exists as a kind of bottleneck to keep our experiment limited for now, and we already expanded it from 25 to 500 per community. However, the cap could come in handy for communities managed by a small number of people—or those that actually want to be small, which we’ve heard feedback about. The most likely outcome is that the cap will become optional.
If a community acts out will there be an option to report them?
Yes, we’re building moderation features for inside communities now. We are also building moderation features for communities themselves—so they can be reported the same way posts and blogs can be reported. Communities, overall, have to adhere to the same guidelines as everything and everyone else on Tumblr.
Thank you for your questions, and keep 'em coming folks.
ICYMI...
Hi,
The community I created got approved and I was looking at the different options and things before sending out invites or posting to say that people could ask for one. I clicked the button to invite members and it just showed a random list of accounts whereas I expected to at least get to pick from a list of blogs I follow and who I therefore know might be interested in joining.
It will let me search for people to invite, but I don't remember all the names of the blogs I follow to just search that way.
Are there any plans to at least make the default selection of blogs to send invites to be blogs you follow or who follow you? Would be way easier than having to flick between tabs to copy paste names.
Answer: Hello, @alexafaie!
Thanks for raising this with us—it’s a good point.
We are glad to say that we are currently working on improving that list and have recently updated it to prioritize showing your recently-followed blogs. We hope this comes as good news!
Thanks for the feedback, and have a lovely day. Keep the Communities questions coming, folks.
Will there be a way to request to join communities? So far, the process to join one seems to be to message the admin of one and ask, which feels a little clunky and discouraging when you're not already acquaintances
Answer: Hey there, @distantsobbingnoises!
We are so glad you asked. Feel clunky and discouraged no more, and hear us when we respond with a loud and proud: positive, affirmative, si, ja, oui, and yes, it's coming!
A way to request to join communities is on its way, and once we have more to share—which won’t be too long—you will be the first to know. Keep those eyes peeled, people.
Thanks for your questions. Keep ’em coming!
I think Tumblr could be made better if we had a tab on the activity page that said viewing history. On this tab it would show the user the accounts they visited as well as the posts they’ve seen, and these would be under dates starting from when they first created their account to now. For example,
You viewed (insert blog’s name) on Month/Day/Year
You viewed (insert post title’s name) on Month/Day/Year
This would make it easier for users to locate the bogs they’ve visited. Without having to rely on memory.
I also think there should be a Comments tab. This tab allows you to see the posts that you’ve commented on.
It would look like this:
You Commented on (blog name’s post):
(Insert comment) on Month/Day/year
Tumblr could become a better app by making it easier for its users to reconnect with blogs , without the stress of trying to remember the blog’s name as well as the post’s name.
Answer: Hey there, @blackterrae!
As it happens, you can see the blogs you’ve visited recently on the For You feed! There’s a “Recently visited blogs” carousel… but as for a whole page dedicated to this, that would certainly be neat someday.
Your suggestion of “Posts you have replied to” is an equally good idea. Obviously, you can see reblogged posts (duh, that’s your blog!) and your liked posts in the Likes tab, but you’re right to point out that there is no way to see replied posts right now.
A simple directory listing of what communities already exist would be incredibly helpful for discovery. I only managed to hear of one (!) so far because I happened to be a couple degrees of separation from its creator and saw people I follow reblogging their post saying they were open for invitation requests. Help people who want to seek this out! it shouldn't rely on some kind of chance that a community might pop up in a tag or on For You or something.
Answer: Hi there, @arcanetrivia!
A short answer, and hopefully a sweet one: great minds think alike. We are literally working on something like this as we speak. Or, indeed, write.
And we would cordially invite y’all to stay tuned as we work on Communities, with lots of work underway. We hope you love it.
Have a lovely day, and keep those questions coming y'all.
ICYMI...
I greatly appreciate the existence of the export feature. However, have you considered adding an option to only back up a certain time period for a blog? Right now I can only choose to export the entirety of my tumblr. Wouldn't it take less time and resources if I could choose to just export the last month or two?
Answer: Hey there, @fortunes-haven!
This is a good question. So we can say that it would take fewer resources per request, but sadly it is not quite that simple.
Our export process doesn’t have the capability to do this right now, and we would have to build it. We also cannot say for sure that more users suddenly doing more smaller exports would necessarily take fewer resources overall, so, unfortunately, it’s not very high on our priority list for those reasons.
Thanks for your question, and we will be in touch here should anything change. Keep 'em coming, people.
hey, it is very time consuming to look at notifications and have to click into so many of the text post ones because there's no detail at all for what it actually says most of the time.
what decides whether a text post has some of its text shown in the notification tab? why do other posts exclude any preview text altogether? are there plans to change this?
personally, I would love an optional toggle that gives me more verbose notifications. i want to know what text posts people are interacting with, without having to open literally every single one to find out! I don't care if it would look a bit cluttered, i 100% would rather be able to tell exactly what post every notification is for at just a glance.
Answer: Hello there @cinna-bunnie!
Great question. We try to summarize posts for notifications in a variety of ways, but we have limited space in the current notifications space, so we try to optimize it as best as we can. There is always room for improvement, though, so if you find specific posts that seem like they are missing a text summary that should be there, please feel free to send them to us in a Support ticket, and we’ll take a look! There may be a bug here we can fix.
It is unlikely that we’ll make our notifications longer or more verbose, even as a toggle, because we’d have to store even more redundant data in the notification. Ultimately, we want activity and notifications to be quick and easy to parse through, which typically means small and concise.
Thanks for getting in touch, and keep ’em coming, folks!
Hello! Are there plans to perhaps embed images into polls for the choices to choose from? I think this would be a super neat function to have, especially for those who make graphics as a hobby or for a living. The same is equally true for those who are doing giveaways or contests or just doing things for fun.
Answer: Hi there, @shinsources!
This would be a lot of fun! Sadly, we do not have much to offer here beyond saying that, while there are no plans for this in the near term, we would love to do it someday. With some luck, perhaps we could make this happen somewhere down the line—it's a great idea.
Thanks for your question, and of course, we will be in touch here should we have any updates for you. And we hope that we do, before long.
Hi!
Are there any plans to improve how users can prune a reblog chain before reblogging it themselves?
Right now, we either have to remove all the additional posts, or find a reblog from before a particular part was added. That's tricky, and being able to just snip the rest of the chain off at more points would make life a lot easier.
Answer: Hey, @tartrazeen!
Good news! This is already supported in the API via the “exclude_trail_items” parameter when creating or editing a reblog. However, it only really works for posts stored in our Neue Post Format (NPF), which excludes all posts made before 2016 and many posts on web before August 2023. For that reason, we don’t expect this will ever be made a “real” feature that you can access in our official clients. It wouldn’t be too wise of us to design, build, and ship an interface for something we know won’t even work on the majority of posts.
If you don’t fancy doing this via the API yourself, there are other solutions to leverage this feature—namely, third-party browser extensions. For example, XKit Rewritten has something called “Trim Reblogs,” which allows you to do exactly what you ask… though with all the caveats about availability mentioned above.
Thanks for your question. We hope this helps!
Hey WIP,
Would it be feasible to allow pinning more than 1 post? Having a single big pinned post front and center is very useful, but sometimes i do wish i could separate different topics into different pinned posts instead of trying to fit everything into one.
An artist, for example, could have 3 separate pinned posts covering:
As topics these flow well enough that they all work as a single well written post, but not all topics flow as smoothly or carry the same tone. I would also imagine a follow up request to being able to change the order of pinned posts.
What are your thoughts?
Answer: Hello, @cinna-bunnie!
A little plot twist for you. We actually built the infrastructure for pinned posts on Tumblr to allow as many pinned posts as you want. We have, however, limited it to just one for now.
This is mostly because pinned posts can take up a lot of space when viewing blogs, and this can be a little frustrating for people who have already seen the pinned posts and only want to get to the latest content. So we need to solve that problem before we expand it to more than one pinned post. We might return to this in the future—and we will be sure to let you know if we get around to it.
Keep the questions coming, y’all!
A simple directory listing of what communities already exist would be incredibly helpful for discovery. I only managed to hear of one (!) so far because I happened to be a couple degrees of separation from its creator and saw people I follow reblogging their post saying they were open for invitation requests. Help people who want to seek this out! it shouldn't rely on some kind of chance that a community might pop up in a tag or on For You or something.
Answer: Hi there, @arcanetrivia!
A short answer, and hopefully a sweet one: great minds think alike. We are literally working on something like this as we speak. Or, indeed, write.
And we would cordially invite y’all to stay tuned as we work on Communities, with lots of work underway. We hope you love it.
Have a lovely day, and keep those questions coming y'all.
