Heads up! We’re changing the way we parse URLs on tagged and search pages, to properly encode/decode them to support spaces, hyphens, plus signs, and underscores. Most of these changes will be invisible to you, but if you’ve kept bookmarks or links to tagged and search pages on Tumblr or your blog, read on!
What does it do? Today, and with that toggle disabled, going to a blog’s tagged URL like https://staff.tumblr.com/tagged/tumblr-tuesday would turn “tumblr-tuesday” into “tumblr tuesday” and you’d see posts with that tag. Same with search URLs. If you have that toggle enabled, that https://staff.tumblr.com/tagged/tumblr-tuesday URL will be decoded as “tumblr-tuesday” instead. If you want to link to the “tumblr tuesday” tag on your blog, you’ll have to use “tumblr%20tuesday” in the URL. But this means that if you use certain special characters in your tags, you’ll now properly be able to link to them!
The toggle above gives you early access to figure this all out. On December 1st, 2021, we’ll be enabling this behavior for all blogs on Tumblr.
We’ll update all of the links when you click on tags in Tumblr. However, if you manually added links to your tags in your blog description, theme, somewhere off Tumblr, saved bookmarks, or in posts (like a pinned post on your blog), then you’ll need to update those links if they contain spaces, underscores, or hyphens. Spaces in tags will now be encoded as “%20” rather than “-” or “+”. To do this, turn that toggle on, and click around on your tags to see if any of the URLs changed. Having this setting enabled and updating any links you’ve saved somewhere will future-proof you for when we roll this change out site-wide.
We hope this is great news for anyone who uses tags in specific ways (we see you!) and has been frustrated that the way to link to them has been inconsistent, or just plain not working since… forever. We’re working on several fixes across Tumblr related to these inconsistencies, but the majority of them require no action on your part.
#PSA #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #this needed doing but it’s a shame that they spent fourteen years digging the hole first #the sooner you fix it the fewer links are lying around to break #(reminder: my Tumblr is for interaction and appearing-on-your-dashboard purposes only) #(the Tumblr-hosted archives are *not* the canonical copy of this blog and #we here at Brinens and Things disclaim responsibility for all broken links and other such issues found within them) #(please visit wp.brinbellway.net for a maintained version)