Sometimes, time context is important. If we say we pushed an update yesterday, and that post ends up getting reblogged by someone a year later, “yesterday” might get interpreted very wrong and confuse quite a few people.
But we’ve fixed that now! The Timestamps extension now puts timestamps on reblogged original posts by default. You can say goodbye to reblogging old news with a feeling of urgency, and hello to realising that all million-note posts are 8 years or so old (without any extra clicks).
You can also extend this to show timestamps on all reblog comments, letting you see just how quickly those hilarious interactions take place or how long it took before someone else thought of a better punchline to a post. Data junkies of all types, this one’s for you.
We’ve also done up the preferences! Want to turn off reblog timestamps? Easy. Want to only have reblog timestamps? Just as easy! Go take a look!
As always, if you have any problems, questions or anything else to say about this update, our askbox and Discord server are open as usual, or you can open a GitHub issue if you’d rather!
Enjoy!
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this update is fantastic and I highly recommend it #also I didn’t even realise until reading this that there’s an option to make *every* link in a reblog chain show a timestamp #(as opposed to just OP + the last link) #so I turned that on and now it’s even more amazing
One backslash: \ Two backslashes: \ Three: \ Four: \ Five: \
…but pages work completely differently and will never display multiple backslashes in a row.
EDIT: oh my god. The escape sequence for a backslash in a tumblr post is \, but just \ will work fine if you only need one. The escape sequence for a backslash in a tumblr page is anywhere from one to four backslashes, parsed greedily. If you want to display \ in a page you need to input .
What I just typed into this input box was “If you want to display \ in a page you need to input \.”
Also: every time you edit a page it reduces the length of each string of backslashes by a factor of two.
Alice wants her About page to say “Double \ backslashes are fun!”
The canonical way to do this:
* Type “Double \ backslashes are fun!” into the edit box. * Hit “Update Preview”. It will show “Double \ backslashes are fun!”; ignore it, it’s wrong. But now there’s a Save button! * Save. Go view your About page, which says “Double \ backslashes are fun!”. Yay! * Never edit your About page again.
If you do make the mistake of editing your About page, you will see “Double \ backslashes are fun!” in the edit box and also in the preview. Be sure to correct \ to \; if you don’t, then the next time you save, your About page will look like “Double \ backslashes are fun!” and the next time you edit you’ll see “Double \ backslashes are fun!” in the preview and so on until you give up and make a Dreamwidth account.
…
Post previews are broken, but in the opposite direction; instead of underinterpreting backslashes twice over, they overinterpret them a single time. If I hit “Preview” right now, this is what I see:
Fortunately, I think posts are stable and don’t mess up your backslashes when you edit them.
Quick update: every time you reblog it parses the previous posts an extra time, so if you have a long reblog chain, the OP will eventually be stripped of all but one backslash in each sequence.
Reblog to destroy the backslashes! I’ll start by typing 64 of them: \\\\\\\\
To clarify: if you go to my Tumblr and view the reblog immediately above this one, you see this:
But if you view that same reblog in your feed, you see this:
This is an exciting new discovery: Tumblr has a “first one’s free” policy on reblogs viewed from the feed; only the SECOND reblog will start cutting into your backslashes. But at least on my theme+browser+OS+bloodtype combination, this policy does not apply to someone’s Tumblr viewed directly.
If I’m wrong about how any of this works, shame on you for bothering to check.
Tags:
#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”until you give up and make a Dreamwidth account”) #((…how the fuck am I going to archive this)) #((I guess I’ll just treat however it appears in my tumblr-utils scrape as the canonical version)) #((that’s usually where I pull from when adding new posts to the WordPress))
Oh, Tumblr, thanks for hiding a really important reblog with some really important commentary from me. What else are you pretending hasn’t been said?
In just a minute or so, I’ve found two more cases where this happened.
That means it’s happening all the time.
WHAT THE HELL.
Were they all first-degree reblogs of asks? Reblogs of asks, if they are reblogged directly from the OP, show up as commentary-less in the notes regardless of whether they actually lack commentary. Reblogs of reblogs do show commentary. (I don’t remember if the intermediary reblog needs to have commentary or not, but I don’t think it does.)
This is a long-standing and widely known bug, but not always widely known enough.
(Probably we should adopt a social norm of avoiding commentary on first-degree ask reblogs. If one really wants to reblog an ask to respond to it, and there isn’t already a first-degree reblog available, one first reblogs it without commentary (perhaps a small note to one’s followers that one is about to add something) and then reblogs oneself to add the commentary.)
(Is there some sort of centralised wiki or something for unofficial Tumblr documentation? Spreading each individual fact through word of mouth does fit with the general usage style of Tumblr, but the coverage isn’t always that great.)
I did not know this. This is pretty dumb, though. I agree, tumblr really does need a wiki or something.
It was still a thing last I checked, anyway. In your activity, can you see the reblog notification for the first-degree ask in the popcorn conversation? Does the notification include the asterisk?
Also, I once tried reblogging an ask from someone other than the OP, but where mine was the first reblog in the chain to include commentary, and it didn’t notify properly. It looks like the first-degree ask *does* need to have something in it for the next degree to show up.
uh I can’t find that post in my activity at a glance but I remember looking at the time and it matched what you were describing.
I’ve been on Twitter lately since it’s part of my job (not in the sense anyone told me to do it, just in the sense lots of traffic comes from there and lots of conversations happen there which I need to stay on top of) and the ways it’s different than Tumblr are interesting.
I actually like Tumblr’s atmosphere a lot better. I super don’t know how much of this is who I choose to follow on each platform, and it’s plausible that this is 100% selection effects, but I feel like most of the people who are mad here are mad from personal experience about bad stuff that’s affecting them, even if they’ve picked a wildly unproductive or inappropriate paradigm to use to engage with it. People are upset that their community doesn’t have stuff they need, or upset that the words they use to describe their experiences are getting used differently by other people. And – even when I think they’re wrong, it’s really valuable to understand what things are hurting people.
On Twitter people are mostly mad about the news of the day. And it’s not that the news of the day doesn’t matter and doesn’t affect thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people, but the vast majority of the reactions are not about how the news affects people, by people affected. They’re broader and more narrativizing and more focused on who wins and who loses, and unless you have the pitch-perfect personal angle I think it’s regarded as a little self-centered to engage with the news by thinking about the things that are hurting you and why they’re hurting you.
Also, most people on Tumblr are young and I see them grow and evolve a lot over time. Most people on Twitter are older and it’s kind of rare to see them change their minds.
I think serious ideas from way outside your bubble are more likely to reach you on tumblr, since people have enough time and space to spell them out at enough length they seem interesting even to people who don’t already agree.
And… I’m less sure about this one, but I think tumblr might have already built up some immunity to some of the pure-outrage conversations that I see on twitter a lot. Most people here are survivors of at least one fandom blowing itself up over disagreements that were deeply felt and deeply hurtful but, ultimately, didn’t make the world a safer place for a single person, and I feel like most people who I follow on here are pretty good at identifying those dynamics when they crop up. I do not think most people on Twitter has gotten good at this yet. And wow, I hope they do soon.
Tags:
#interesting #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #Twitter #discourse cw?
Oh, Tumblr, thanks for hiding a really important reblog with some really important commentary from me. What else are you pretending hasn’t been said?
In just a minute or so, I’ve found two more cases where this happened.
That means it’s happening all the time.
WHAT THE HELL.
Were they all first-degree reblogs of asks? Reblogs of asks, if they are reblogged directly from the OP, show up as commentary-less in the notes regardless of whether they actually lack commentary. Reblogs of reblogs do show commentary. (I don’t remember if the intermediary reblog needs to have commentary or not, but I don’t think it does.)
This is a long-standing and widely known bug, but not always widely known enough.
(Probably we should adopt a social norm of avoiding commentary on first-degree ask reblogs. If one really wants to reblog an ask to respond to it, and there isn’t already a first-degree reblog available, one first reblogs it without commentary (perhaps a small note to one’s followers that one is about to add something) and then reblogs oneself to add the commentary.)
(Is there some sort of centralised wiki or something for unofficial Tumblr documentation? Spreading each individual fact through word of mouth does fit with the general usage style of Tumblr, but the coverage isn’t always that great.)
I did not know this. This is pretty dumb, though. I agree, tumblr really does need a wiki or something.
It was still a thing last I checked, anyway. In your activity, can you see the reblog notification for the first-degree ask in the popcorn conversation? Does the notification include the asterisk?
Also, I once tried reblogging an ask from someone other than the OP, but where mine was the first reblog in the chain to include commentary, and it didn’t notify properly. It looks like the first-degree ask *does* need to have something in it for the next degree to show up.
I just realized that I’m right-shifted. I have been using only the right shift key for capitalization for an unknown period of time, and deliberately using the left shift key feels awkward and makes me mistype my passwords.
Are you left-handed? I feel like the reason I’m left-shifted is to keep my right index finger closer to the mouse touchpad, but that might be an after-the-fact justification.
Yeah, when I did an informal survey the vast majority of people used the right thumb for spacing. Left handers weren’t more likely to use left thumb, but I also only had two in the sample, so.
I didn’t ask what hand people shifted with, because I didn’t know anybody left shifted.
I left shift / alt / ctrl / super, which is supported heavily by the fact that keyboards are always fucking up the right hand versions of these keys and alt right gets overloaded in a lot of keyboard layouts
The worst thing about the tumblr model is that it’s too late to correct it, even if I edit the original all the reblogs still have the typo.
That’s definitely a downside. Personally, I currently favour a compromise between the Tumblr and Pillowfort models: you can’t forcibly alter or delete the post as it appears in other people’s reblogs, *except* that you can force them to display a bold “This post has been [edited/deleted]” message at the top of your post. Maybe the notice can optionally include the reason for the edit.
I don’t know of any site that actually does it that way, though.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #Pillowfort
Oh, Tumblr, thanks for hiding a really important reblog with some really important commentary from me. What else are you pretending hasn’t been said?
In just a minute or so, I’ve found two more cases where this happened.
That means it’s happening all the time.
WHAT THE HELL.
Were they all first-degree reblogs of asks? Reblogs of asks, if they are reblogged directly from the OP, show up as commentary-less in the notes regardless of whether they actually lack commentary. Reblogs of reblogs do show commentary. (I don’t remember if the intermediary reblog needs to have commentary or not, but I don’t think it does.)
This is a long-standing and widely known bug, but not always widely known enough.
(Probably we should adopt a social norm of avoiding commentary on first-degree ask reblogs. If one really wants to reblog an ask to respond to it, and there isn’t already a first-degree reblog available, one first reblogs it without commentary (perhaps a small note to one’s followers that one is about to add something) and then reblogs oneself to add the commentary.)
(Is there some sort of centralised wiki or something for unofficial Tumblr documentation? Spreading each individual fact through word of mouth does fit with the general usage style of Tumblr, but the coverage isn’t always that great.)
Yes, I think they all were. I’ve been dealing with a lot more asks than usual lately, so that would be why it seems like it just started happening. I’d never heard of this before. Thanks for letting me know.
Tags:
#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(yes I know rustingbridges also responded to this recently) #(but I haven’t decided yet whether and what to say in response to that one) #(I’ll get it to within the next few days or so)
so- the reply button shows up on reblogs sometimes, now (apparently not on image posts, for no good reason, even if it’s not a reblog, thanks tumblr), but like… if you reply to something someone reblogged, does that reply go to the source, or the person who reblogged it?
I recently got a reply on a post I reblogged, and it showed up in my activity. I don’t know whether it also shows up in the OP’s activity or not. It’d make sense if it shows up there too, since that’s how likes and reblogs work, but, you know, Tumblr.
(I suppose the simplest way I could find that out is to just try replying to this reblog and have you see if it shows up in your activity.)
P.S. Except I’m not getting a reply button, so scratch that. Maybe I have to follow the OP for two weeks like the old replies required? I stop by your blog fairly often, but I’ve never officially followed you.
Brinens and Things 