#general staff

[scrapironflotilla]

...I dined with some other people to celebrate the presentation of a medal to our vet. A wonderful decoration given to him by the Minister of Agriculture of France for services rendered to agriculture.  Nobody knows quite what he has done except put a lot of horses out of their misery. However it was a good gathering with cheap champagne from the local wine shop in which by the way I am billeted.

Major Carr on some of the benefits of being a staff officer, 27 April 1917.

“services rendered to agriculture”

[fo-cus]

What the absolute living fuck is TumblrMart. @staff get rid of it. Get rid of live. And get rid of the TikTok-esque video reels.

[trendynewsnow]

Recent Russian Airstrikes on Ukraine Result in Casualties and Military Responses

Recent Russian Strikes on Ukraine: Casualties and Military Actions In the latest wave of hostilities, Russian airstrikes on Ukraine have resulted in the tragic death of at least one individual and left 22 others injured, according to local officials who reported the situation on Friday. The assault included a significant launch of 132 drones targeting various locations across Ukraine during the…

[tinystepsforward]

idk how many of you remember this but a few years ago tumblr ran a universally panned ad campaign for (us american) pride month that went "the gayest place on the internet".

well someone planning that campaign dropped in to ask the queer automatticians for advice on that and universally me and the other trans people involved were like "don't do it. i am so serious. don't do it. people on tumblr won't understand that it wasn't automattic who instituted the porn ban, or they will, but they'll recognize that automattic hasn't done anything, hands tied or not, to reverse it. nobody will like this. it will be a disaster." and they thanked us for our thoughts and went ahead with it anyway and then had to do retrospectives about how badly it went and were like "we just didn't know" and [gestures] yeah [edit: i think the person who rbed saying it was queerest place on the internet was right, my brain is fried, sorry! and that's... even worse lmao]

[spockvarietyhour]

I can't help but feel this might be a nod to @dduane's Dark Mirror novel...

[sarasade]

Since The Dragon Prince is ending (or at least the second arc is ending) in December I'll celebrate that by listing the funniest things I've witnessed in the fandom during these years:

-The Great Aaravos Thirst of 2019.

-Knowing The Thirst™ had been even greater if Tumblr wouldn't have banned porn just a year earlier.

-Aaravos' character designer being very happy with all the thirst posting.

-The Great Virst of 2019 that was balanced out by the people who thought Viren was a total troll.

-Rayla-Claudia-Callum love triangle speculations before s3.

-"Viren actually killed everyone, including Sarai and his ex-wife", speculations during s1-3.

-Aaravos Is A Good Person and a cinnamon roll -speculations.

-Fandom calling Ethari "The Tinker" before his name was revealed and also correctly predicting him and Runaan being a couple long before it got confirmed.

-Jason Simpson (Viren's VA) being grumpy about people shipping Aaravos and Viren while Todd Erik Dellums (Aaravos's VA) egged the fans on and seemed to find the ship pretty funny.

-After the Midnight Star poem's full English translation got released some fans concluded that Elarion was a human girl Aaravos once was in love with and thus Elavos was born. You can still search the ship name on Tumblr to experience the time campsule of 2019 era of the fandom. Yes, people shipped Aaravos with a literal city and I think that's beautiful.

-The drought period of 2019-2022 hiatus where it was just a couple really weird terminally online fans posting their harmless headcanons, including a small fandom of a. ten people forming around Viren's ex-wife Lissa.

-Unhinged TDP fan theories like "Aaravos is Callum's Dad" and "Callum will learn every primal source" aka wanting TDP to be Avatar 2.0 but with elves.

-The fan response that parodied these theories including "Everyone is a Startouch elf, especially Bait"

-The Great FartGate of 2022 aka all of TDP Twitter collectively complaining about the fart jokes in s4.

-These 2024 Valentine's Day posts most likely done by the lead writer Devon Giehl.

-If you search Aaravos on Google the most frequently asked question is about his gender.

-TDP wiki gleefully listing Aaravos and Viren as Sir Sparklepuff's parents after s5.

-The fandom never letting go of the "Viren imprisoned Harrow in Pip" theory.

-Which Primal Source Are You -Quiz from 2018 foreshadowing events of the show like "where would you hide a dangerous magical object" and one of the answers being "in the bottom of the sea" possibly referring to Aaravos' pearl.

-A tweet fans thought was a mistake actually foreshadowed Aaravos being a giant.

I'll add more later if I feel like it.

edit:

ok one more: behold, one of the most popular TDP posts on Tumblr

[hotwaterandmilk]

I was recently fortunate enough to win an auction for a piece of Wedding Peach merchandise I've been unsuccessfully trying to win online for years (at this point, literally decades) and it got me thinking about how lucky I am to not be starting my collection today.

Prices for all older, more obscure magical girl items have ballooned over the past ten years but Wedding Peach merchandise is definitely one of the worst offenders. It's not uncommon to see single manga volumes going for 10k yen, 20k yen or more for the picture books, and let's not even touch on the amount the toys go for (literally several thousand dollars a pop).

In an ideal world we'd have better access to the series itself at least (the Japanese release of the DVDs and manga, for example, are in high demand due to the manga being out of print for something like 28 years and the DVDs being a relatively limited run from 25 years ago). I understand it's unlikely that we'll be getting more fun toys or merchandise for the series, but it is truly bleak when people can't even access the series itself.

This isn't some lost media type thing, this is just capitalism and it solidifies why I feel a sense of duty to ruin my own collection in order to archive what I have. If my house burns down or washes away in a flood, I truly don't think I can restart my collection and have a fraction of what I have now ever again. It's too expensive and too time-consuming, I simply don't have another 25 years up my sleeve to dig through every possible website to try and find scraps of 90s Ciao magazine issues.

In that sense I feel like I should share what I have with others while I have the opportunity. Even if a teenager today falls for Wedding Peach like I did as a kid, they would need to be extremely wealthy to get these pieces together and I just don't think your ability to own the core of a series should come down to wealth alone.

Goodness knows I'm not wealthy and I had very little growing up, hence my collection took decades to get where it is now. I don't want people to have to endure all that just to see a picture book from 30 years ago or to see an obscure illustration from a Ciao paper bag given away for free in 1994.

The efforts of fans keep series like this alive long after most companies have dismissed their long term profitability (although I do see you Germany with your beautiful hardback manga editions and I thank you).

Not everyone wants to break down their collection for the benefit of others and I respect that (there are some things in my collection I don't want to pull apart either), but I appreciate the efforts of those who do and aspire to do better with my own archiving as I work to get Weddingpeach.net updated to celebrate 30 years of the manga series.

[blueskittlesart]

idk if anyone else has gotten the beta for the new communities feature but these features in particular are a little bit concerning to me. i haven't tested this, but it looks to be an entirely separate comment section that's hidden from the post's op if they're not in the community, meaning you're removing a creator's ability to moderate the comment section surrounding their work. this is especially concerning for me as a creator who produces content related to transness and gender identity--moderating my comments is often a constant daily struggle to keep bigots from having their way with my posts, and this seems like it has the potential to remove or at least significantly impair my ability to moderate who engages with my content and how. Also, on a site that's had major problems with transphobic and racist harassment in the past, i can see this very quickly devolving into a way to dogpile on certain users or even organize the kind of harassment campaigns we KNOW certain people on this site are prone to engage in with no way for any outsiders to even WITNESS what's going down. At the very least i think the op of a post reblogged into a community needs to have access to the community comments (which may already be a feature--like i said i haven't tested it yet but this explanation reads to me like they don't) but on a larger scale i think the devs for this site NEED to think about the potential for misuse when putting out new features like this because this just looks like a nightmare waiting to happen to me

[kimdokjas]

wait wait, what’s the change tumblr did to the reblog chains ? 🥲🥲🥲 I’m so lost

okay so basically, let's say you see a post on your dash

before the update, if you clicked on a url, you could do 3 things:

view that specific reblog on the blog you follow (A)

view the previous reblog on the blog A reblogged it from (B)

view the original post on op's blog (C)

however, staff recently implemented an update where clicking on a url no longer takes you to that specific post. now, clicking on a url just takes you to the blog itself.

this means that you now get 5 things:

view ONLY that specific reblog on the blog you follow (A) -> changed location near header. also, you will now ONLY see that post and nothing else

view ONLY the original post on op's blog (C) -> changed location near header. you will only see that post and nothing else. and ONLY if the op hasn't deleted it, otherwise it just shows an error

view the blog of the person you follow (D)

view the blog of the person D reblogged it from (F) -> option B no longer exists

view the blog of the op (E)

you might be thinking: "cool! i get more options so that's good, right?" well, no.

there are SEVERAL things wrong with this and it goes beyond the prev tags issue

1) first of all, it's counterintuitive that A and C changed locations to the area near the header, especially if your userbase was already used to the previous functions. it just seems like horrible UX design to me but let's put that aside for now.

2) as you can see, option B which allowed you to see the previous reblog of a post no longer exists.

now, if you click on the previous url, you will just be taken to their entire blog. you can no longer view the post itself.

someone asked staff about this, and they replied in this post that the change was INTENTIONAL and if you want to view the previous reblog you would have to "go through the notes view".

to borrow what someone else said:

basically, this update just killed the prev tags culture in one fell swoop.

(sure, you can still use it to reply directly to the person you're reblogging from, but it's now literally useless to use "prev tags" for everyone else involved. sure, you can choose to copy tags or peer review them, but again, if people will have to copy them then the less people are likely to use them, and not every prev lends itself to peer-reviewing imo)

now, listen. i know not everyone likes the prev tags culture, but it just seems like such a poorly-thought decision to kill a culture that like... half of your entire userbase uses (see this poll as a quick reference) and that's UNIQUE to your site and sets you apart from other social media.

but it's also not even just prev tags. let's say you want to remove an annoying addition on a post's reblog chain? you can no longer do that.

however, i feel like this is the most important point:

regardless of how you may feel about the prev tags culture, the pure UI aspect of it should remain

what i mean by this is: even if you don't like prev tags, simply 1) being able to access the reblog chain, and 2) clicking on a post and actually have it take you to their BLOG (and not just a page with that one single post) is literally essential navigation.

this update threatens to drive down user engagement (which is already critically low) by making it harder to navigate. which is actually another point:

3) even if you click on A and C now to view those specific posts, it's NOT the same as it used to be.

before, you could view the reblog directly on the blog. so you could just scroll down and see the other posts leading up to it. now, you will be taken to a page where you will ONLY see that post and nothing else.

but also, you can no longer easily navigate other people's blogs.

you know how sometimes you would see like 50 notifications of someone going through an entire tag on your blog? that's going to happen a lot less, i'm afraid.

let's suppose you want to go to op's blog because they're an artist and you want to see more of their art. so you click on C and see that the tag they use for posts with their art is "#my art"

cool! before, you could just click on that tag and immediately view ALL of their art as long as the posts have that tag.

but now, if you click on that tag, it will take you to the ENTIRE tumblr tag with literally all the posts that everyone in the history of time has tagged with that specific tag.

now, to do the same thing that just took 2 clicks before, you would have to: click on C to view the post -> look for the tag you want to navigate -> click E to view their whole blog -> scroll and look for a post that just so happens to have that tag (the search function is literally useless) and hope to god that there's a recent one or you'll have to scroll for ages or simply give up -> if you happen to find it, click on that tag to navigate their posts.

you see how this is counterproductive, right? you see how this can literally drive down engagement with content creators, right?

if you make people's blogs harder to navigate, you will literally drive down the number of likes and reblogs on their posts, which have already been steadily declining for years now.

4) options D and E to view the blogs and not the posts are literally useless because you could already access other people's blogs before. you just had to click on their url to view their blogs starting from that specific post AND you could choose to just refresh it to view their newest posts.

either way, the change just seems completely unnecessary. and again, it's not just about the prev tags culture but about basic UI.

so what can we do about it?

i normally don't advocate for flooding staff with messages but i do feel like this is one of the worst updates staff has ever done (and that's saying something) and something needs to change.

even if they don't retcon the entire update, that's fine, but staff could at least add the option to view the reblog chain as a different feature (maybe even opt-in) for example. there are better ways to go about this than just axing an entire existing feature.

also, this same issue that makes it harder to navigate blogs needs to change. i feel like content creators will be especially affected by this unless this changes because you can no longer easily navigate their tags, so it will inevitably drive down engagement.

so please, contact staff and let them know we want a change.

you can contact support here!

here's a template for a possible message you could send, but feel free to edit it. (under category you can choose "Feedback")

Hi, I would like to politely request a change to the recent update that affects the reblog chain of posts. Regardless of the "prev tags" culture itself, the UI aspect of being able to view the reblog chain of a post is essential for navigation on this website. Even adding it as a separate, opt-in feature would be a huge help. Additionally, clicking on a post and then on one of the tags now takes you to the entire tumblr tag instead of the tag on that blog, which makes it harder to navigate blogs. Both of these issues have the potential to drive down user engagement by actively making it harder to navigate Tumblr, but especially for content creators. I hope you can do something to address these issues as soon as possible. Thanks in advance and have a nice day.

also, if you can and/or want, reblogs are appreciated to help spread the word!

that's pretty much the gist of the issue from what i've seen, but if anyone else has anything to add or a different way we could contact staff to make ourselves heard, please feel free to let me know!

TLDR: it's not just about prev tags, this update affects basic functionality and content creators as well

Update Sept 07, 2024: this issue was "fixed" a few months back, although with some caveats / downgrades. You can check out this post for how to view the reblog chain, but all the other issues addressed in this post still remain.

[sunshineandlyrics]

Rebel Louis. He dialed 9 again.

England v Slovakia, Glastonbury, 30 June 2024.

[scrapironflotilla]

I am glad you like the idea of my having this job. Up to date I have had nothing to do. I live in a great chateau, and occasionally drive about in a … motor car, and try to look important. 

Major Lawrence Carr on his job as GSO2 for the 51st Highland Division in 1917.

[fatedroses]

Lucius and Titus yae Galvus

aka the 8'2" standard bearer puppy of a man and the 6'0" stoic machinist younger brother, or the sons of emet who are his spitting images in two different ways.

[mossy-paws]

I miss clementine. I miss vinestaff's adopted creature. Could we see some new clementine. I just want to give the cuty a second hug.

(Bias towards the past? what's that :) )

funny enough! Guess what I’ve been forgetting to post for quite some time now :)

[dizzybizz]

"looks like i win! take that!"

[loki-zen]

Cynical prediction (non-election-related):

One big eventual consequence of widespread genAI implementation is going to be the revelation that a lot of things we assumed were checked by more than one person before they went out to the general public never actually were, not in the detail you'd hope for at least - we've actually been relying on the diligence and competence of individuals who were not actually tested on or rewarded for displaying this.

[cozylittleartblog]

Please come back to Deviantart and upload all your art!!!!!!!!!

deviantart can suck my whole entire dick and can keep sucking it until they decide to get rid of their AI bullshit

anyway reminder that y'all should join sheezyart

my username there is cozy