Something that i’ve seen happening in my notifications this week is a new kind of porn blog interacting with my posts, and i want to explain WHY its so important to block them.
In the past all that would happen if a porn blog would follow you is just that, they’d follow you. It was all to do with google algorithyms where if a porn blog was shown as ‘linked’ or following a legitimate site/blog then it increased the place they came in the google searches. Great if you are one of those scam websites that gets people to click on links that either plant malware or are just shady as fuck. Porn blogs were also sometimes shut down without warning so all the scammers hard work was over and gone. Good for us, not good for them. Most of these blogs were just stolen gifs/videos from other porn blogs anyway. If you thought gif stealing was bad/rife in the geek/nerd fandoms, just have a peep at the porn blogs.
Well a lot of the search engines etc caught onto this and built controls into their software, so they found a new way of getting (or at least trying to get) people to click on links to take them off of the tumblr site. This is by finding a random post from a legitimate blogger, which could be about anything, and either deleting the entire content of the post and adding in some ridiculous comment like ‘For more fun follow this link’ with a hyperlink off of tumblr, or if its a photo that in any way is either fun/a meme/or a little nsfw, they keep that in place and just add their link like above. Scroll down their blog and literally every single post will be a reblog and have exactly the same comment on, getting you to click and take you off site.
What does this matter i hear you ask? Well, when it comes to reporting a post, it helps to confuse the tumblr bots/staff as to what’s being reported… the comment or the original post? This means that when a bunch of posts are reported, they are all coming from different originators, this will make tumblr staff’s life even harder, and legitimate blogs are at risk of someone hitting ‘deactivate blog’ in the admin settings, meaning YOU COULD LOOSE YOUR ENTIRE BLOG BECAUSE SOME ASSHOLE PORN BOT REBLOGGED FROM YOU.
So don’t ignore this kind of thing, if you see one of these stupid reblogs (the bots very rarely actually follow you anymore), BLOCK THEM RIGHT THERE AND THEN.
Signal boost. I’ve seen some posts with 100.000 or 200.000 notes and the latest 5 to 7 reblog comments have been nothing but these porn bot phrases!
Report those blogs, it’s 1 more click compared to blocking them (and it blocks them automatically) and it hopefully helps to get rid of them.
If you’ve logged in to Tumblr in the last few days, you will have seen the GDPR warning, telling you Tumblr is part of the Oath family of sites, and requiring you to opt-in to their privacy settings.
You may not have realised that, in contravention of the GDPR rules which ban default opt-ins, if you don’t go into the ‘more options’ button and opt out of each individual sharing partner, Tumblr will share your data with a whole huge list of other companies. Like, 300 of them.
If you’ve already opted in to the Oath privacy stuff, you need to go to your Settings page:
Click the Privacy button on the right:
Then, click the little button next to ‘Cookie Consent’ to revoke it.
After confirming you want to revoke consent, you will immediately be taken to that big privacy opt-in page again. From that point we follow the steps @the-mad-duchess described – first click ‘Manage Options’:
Then, click the blue ‘Manage’ button, and expand the two lists. You’ll see five kinds of data sharing, and like 300 different companies:
The first five you can click manually more easily than using javascript. That might be enough to opt out of any data sharing – but I want to be sure. So, let’s make sure we disable every single enabled partner as well.
However, clicking on 300 little buttons to opt out of is an absurd demand. There is, thankfully, a shortcut, using your browser’s developer tools.
What you want to do is open the web console. In Firefox, you do it like this: click the little menu in top right, then go down to where it says Web Developer:
Then, click the Web Console option:
This will open up the web console in the bottom of the screen. It will have a bunch of messages in it that you can ignore:
As shown, what we want to do is copy and paste some JavaScript code into this, then hit ‘enter’, which will make the browser simulate a mouseclick on every single one of these little buttons and thereby turn them all off. The code is this:
var rows = document.getElementsByClassName("vendor-options")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {rows[i].lastChild.firstChild.click();}
If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, let me briefly explain what this is doing. The first line finds the part of the page with all the buttons in it – specifically, the rows in the table of vendors, which is identified by the “vendor-options”. The second line goes through each of them one by one, and for each row of the table, goes inside and finds the button, and simulates a click on it.
If it works correctly, you will abruptly scroll to the bottom of the page and all those little buttons will slide to the ‘greyed out’ position. Now you can go ahead and click Done, click the OK button, and carry on using Tumblr, trusting that if they keep their word, they won’t share your data with those 300 companies.
I’m gonna chat with the New XKit devs to see if this can be added (they may already be working on it). But I hope this saves you some time.
Note also – this is not actually compliant with the new GDPR laws. The rule is that you have to explicitly opt in to letting companies use your data, you can’t have a list of default opt-ins behind a button like this. At some point, somebody will hopefully sue Yahoo/Oath and establish that in court. In the meantime, let’s keep our data to ourselves.
Tumblr’s at it again, thanks to the new European Privacy Laws. There’s probably nobody who will read this, but it pissed me off so much that I decided to make a post about it. (Ignore the weird language mish-mash, depending on your country the language might differ.)
OK, so many of us get this screen when we try to access our dash:
Realise how the ‘OK’ button is a nice, attention-grabbing blue? If you’re like me, you’re not exactly into reading a 100 pages document and tend to just click it.
My tip? DONT. Instead click on ‘Manage Options’ right next to it:
Now you’ll see this page:
Still pretty harmless, right? That ‘Accept’ button is looking really attractive right now. Instead, click on Verwalten (Probably something like ‘Manage Options’ or something in english) and you’ll get to this page:
Now that’s not too bad, right? I just switched all the buttons to ‘off’, because I’m jealously guarding my personal information and don’t want Tumblr to go off and do who knows what with it. Looks like we’re done! But wait: There’s a SHOW option.
When we click on that one, what we will get is this:
A HUGE list with OVER 300 ENTRIES of companies that can use your data by default if you’d just clicked ‘OK’ on that very first page. Coincidence that this list is hidden that much? Me thinks not. They’re all switched on by default, but I am still a petty bitch that doesn’t want to give out her data, so I switched them all off. All 300+ of them. There is no option to switch them all off at once, and even if you disable all the options above, the companies are still switched on.
(If you wonder how i got that number, I copied the list into excel and looked at the cell number. No way am I actually counting all those entries)
I too, am a petty bitch who unticked every single one.
You’ll also want to check your settings after, as the first time I unchecked it didn’t save
So I was on a mobile browser when I saw this pop-up, and clicked through without reading it.
Does anyone know where to find and edit these settings in any other way? Because I can’t find them anywhere in my account settings.
General settings > privacy > better recommendations (uses your search history to show you more posts)
On desktop Tumblr, the option was Settings > Privacy > Improved Search (uses search history to customize recommendations)
There was also an option to log into my “Privacy Dashboard,” which is apparently a place to see and manage how Oath (Tumblr’s parent company) uses your data to “improve and personalize your experience”:
The Tumblr Privacy Settings link on the Privacy Dashboard takes you to the normal Settings > Privacy page on tumblr, but the “Account Data” page you log into gives you the ability to “see your activity and data for each product you use on your account” (I just had a line of text that said “No data available to show for this account”), another link to the normal Tumblr Privacy Settings page, and a “Download Your Data” option.
If you haven’t already, I’d suggest logging into desktop Tumblr and checking this out. However, I didn’t see any options about clearing my data on the Privacy Dashboard > Account Data page.
tumblr backup 