#for some reason my brain can't respond to tag things on mobile

[centurieslove]

@ all you gorgeous people who have tagged me in things in the past month ily and I WILL respond my life is just a pile of empty moving boxes rn

[rabbitindisguise]

The fundamental purpose people have always used XKit for has been to fix Tumblr and revert it back. Tumblr users don't like new things- and we have good reason to not like new things. Because new Tumblr things generally suck. The only exceptions to this has been the change from nested reblogs, and the font options for mobile. These two features have had the best reception of any modifications so far.

We absolutely need old Tumblr blue. This is pretty much non-negotiable for anyone with migraines that can be set off. A site won't be accessible to everyone's needs, and trying to find the perfect blue isn't going to work. Let there be themes with different types of blues we've seen in the past.

The blacklist is tag only. This doesn't work. I rely on keywords in the posts to get anything blocked. I also need the option to collapse blacklisted posts so that the tags are the only thing visible without taking up a huge amount of space.

Forced endless scrolling is not cool. I'm been scrolling my entire dashboard every day since I first made my main blog in 2013. I need pages. Other people need pages. Pages are essential. Especially working pages that I don't have to manually edit the url just to get back one page of I miss something.

The font isn't more accessible for my dyslexia, and I want the old one back.

All these accessible options have literally made the site so bad that trying to find a way to turn it off is basically impossible for me because I can't be on desktop for more than two seconds. I can't give feedback because I can't even see what features it has because it's so awful to look at my brain quits before I do. Between the migraines and reading fatigue, I'm stuck on mobile. Indefinitely. I like finding bugs and stuff like that but I literally cannot physically use the website even if I'm willing to brave the no-keyword-blacklist no man's land that is my dashboard right now.

Feedback for what people might actually want to see:

Make everything on this website do what it's supposed to do. Audio posts play audio. Video posts play video.

Let people change things if they want to by letting them have custom dashboard themes. It's not that complicated. If you're dead set on changing the colors and the fonts and the aesthetics every five seconds, let people just pick what they want and leave them be.

Don't just bring back pages, make paged scrolling functional. I want to, with a click of a button, go backwards and forwards from whatever place I was when I clicked it. Right before the forced update, I could only see the second page behind the one I was on some of the time.

End the nonsense of forced roll outs. People aren't responding or cooperating because they hate whatever it is that you're doing. Bring a good update, and the users will come around eventually. I'd like the new update if I had a choice about getting to use it.

The ability to turn off features with an individual desktop theme. No rainbow, stuff like that. For desktop and mobile.

More custom stuff like the rainbow text and the curly font, but on both desktop and mobile. Tumblr got so popular in the beginning in part because of the themes for the individual blogs, and a lot of the userbase knows HTML. These are features that no other blogging website offers in this format.

In house meme editor that actually functions the way meme editors are supposed to. No branding. No bells and whistles. An "add font" option that works on gifs and still images, and popular meme templates (which will have to be added to nearly monthly, but classic templates get used all the time). That's all anyone really needs.

More respect for artists. Let images be higher quality without having to click on them. Increase the word count and paragraph limit on posts. Heck, if you want money, let people buy access to posts that the artists lock themselves for that purpose and take a lower cut from their profits than traditional e-commerce websites. Or let people tip. Or set up an e-commerce platform yourselves as an extension of paid themes. Regardless, this site was built on artist participation yet you can barely tell these days.

All of the above would be way more useful than a new site design that's apparently overworking people's laptops and doesn't function with XKit. Sources: me reading complaints about Tumblr in solidarity because I have complaints about Tumblr.

New XKit and the new Tumblr dashboard

Hi everyone! Some of you may be aware that Tumblr has been offering a beta of the new web interface for a little while now. This new web experience comes with some nice perks, such as color palettes, soft refreshing, a built-in tag viewer, and a better user blocking system. It’s also much more accessible for those with reading difficulties, and should be fully compatible with screen readers.

Unfortunately, such drastic improvements has come at a price for those that truly rely on XKit features - the new web interface is entirely new, written from the ground up, and thus, XKit doesn’t work on it.

Recently, we’ve become aware that some people have been forcibly opted into this beta with no option to exit it, and this lines up with the projection that this new web interface will be fully launched by April 2020. However, we do not expect to be able to fully update XKit for this new dashboard before its full launch.

“Oh no! Tumblr’s trying to kill XKit!”

You would be amazed at what’s actually happening. A few Tumblr engineers are working with us and are building things into the new dashboard specifically to make our jobs easier! So please, rest assured that XKit being broken currently is not part of some grand scheme to make the Tumblr dashboard unmodifiable - we just need more time to catch up, and we’re being helped along.

“But I can’t use Tumblr without XKit!”

This is a problem we see echoed a lot. While we will be updating XKit to work on the new dashboard, we can’t give anyone a timescale. So, in the meantime, we ask that you learn to use the new dashboard with all its new features, and give clear, constructive, and respectful feedback to Tumblr support.

Tumblr has already implemented some equivalents of existing XKit features, and we’re already expecting more to appear down the line. If you can successfully communicate why certain XKit features are invaluable to your usage of Tumblr, we may see that list grow.

This is not the end for XKit - merely a stage of metamorphosis. Thank you all for your patience!