Community admins can now allow moderators to invite new members too. Check out your community’s settings!
The ability to search for communities on web is rolled out to everyone. There’s a new dropdown option on search that lets you browse communities related to your search term on the web (this will be in the apps with the next update), and there’s a new “Related Communities” section in the sidebar on the web.
We’re recommending communities for folks who have already joined communities in more places, including a new carousel in For You.
Backdating posts has always had the potential to act in unexpected ways, so we’ve added new warnings about this.
🛠 Fixed
Ads in the iOS app no longer interrupt your background audio. Please update to version 36.4 for the fix.
When leaving a longer reply on desktop web in certain cases or mobile web on Android devices, the cursor will no longer jump up unexpectedly in the text area.
Custom domain verification emails were briefly not being sent September 18th. This was fixed and all pending verification emails were re-sent.
🚧 Ongoing
No ongoing incidents to speak of right now.
🌱 Upcoming
No upcoming launches to announce today.
Experiencing an issue? Check for Known Issues and file a Support Request if you have something new. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
If you use Tumblr on a web browser, you might have noticed us testing a brand new navigation on your dashboard in the last month. Now, after some extensive tweaks, we’ve begun rolling out this new dashboard navigation to everyone using a web browser. Welcome to the new world. It’s very like the old world, just in a different layout.
Why are we doing this? We want it to be as easy as possible for everyone to understand and explore what’s happening on Tumblr—newbies and seasoned travelers alike.
Labels over icons: When adding something new to Tumblr in the past, we’d simply add a new icon to our navigation with little further explanation. Turns out no one likes to press a button when they don’t know what it does. So now, where there’s space, the navigation includes text labels. Since adding these, we’ve noticed more of you venturing to previously unexplored corners of Tumblr. Intrepid!
What’s already been fixed? Thanks to feedback from folks during the testing phase, we’ve been able to make some improvements right out of the gate. Those include returning settings subpages (Account, Dashboard, etc.) to the right of the settings page instead of having them in an expandable item in the navigation on the left; fixing some issues with messaging windows on smaller screens; and streamlining the Account section to make it easier to get to your blogs.
What’s next? We’re looking into making a collapsible version of this navigation and improving the use of screen space for those of you with enormous screens. We’re also working on improving access to your account and sideblogs.
That’s all for now, folks. For questions and suggestions, contact Support using the “Feedback” category. Please select the “Report a bug or crash” category on the support form for technical issues. And keep an eye out for more updates here on @changes.
The Tumblr TV tab, previously only available via a Labs experiment, is now available to everyone. New users will have this tab enabled by default in the third position, while existing users will have it available in the Dashboard Tabs configuration, if not already enabled.
🛠 Fixed
We fixed an issue where long tags could break the Tumblr TV grid.
We have made required fields and character limits clearer in several forms across Tumblr.
We fixed an issue preventing some new users from returning to where they left off after signing up.
🚧 Ongoing
We’re aware of an issue preventing some members from leaving communities.
We’re aware of an issue preventing the renewal of some Tumblr Premium subscriptions. Please contact support if you’re unable to renew your subscription!
Fresh new 3D Tumblr logo that gets colorful when you hover over it
Search bar moved to the left (accommodates some really long search terms—try it)
Unread count badges are now light blue
Activity icon is in the header, and clicking it shows you your first page of notes (and you can click “See everything” to get to your full Activity page)
Get to all your blog stuff under the Account menu (the little human), no matter how far down the Dashboard you’ve scrolled
Our favorite part of today’s big iOS app update? The Trending widget. The more Tumblr on my Today screen, the better. As the release notes put it:
Witness today’s trending tags without even opening the app. Install it thusly: 1. From anywhere in your phone, swipe down from the top of your screen to open up your “Today” view. This is where all your widgets live. 2. Flick your way to the bottom, then tap the “Edit” button. 3. Find “Trending on Tumblr” in the list. There ya go.
At Tumblr, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the performance of the site. This means things like adding caching to heavily used codepaths, testing out new CDN configurations, or upgrading underlying software.
Recently, in a cross-team effort, we upgraded our full web server fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7. The whole upgrade was a fun project with some very cool results, so we wanted to share it with you.
Timeline
It all started as a hackday project in the fall of 2015. @oli and @trav got Tumblr running on one of the PHP 7 release candidates. At this point in time, quite a few PHP extensions did not have support for version 7 yet, but there were unofficial forks floating around with (very) experimental support. Nevertheless, it actually ran!
This spring, things were starting to get more stable and we decided it was time to start looking in to upgrading more closely. One of the first things we did was package the new version up so that installation would be easy and consistent. In parallel, we ported our in-house PHP extensions to the new version so everything would be ready and available from the get-go.
A small script was written that would upgrade (or downgrade) a developer’s server. Then, during the late spring and the summer, tests were run (more on this below), PHP package builds iterated on and performance measured and evaluated. As things stabilized we started roping in more developers to do their day-to-day work on PHP 7-enabled machines.
Finally, in the end of August we felt confident in our testing and rolled PHP 7 out to a small percentage of our production servers. Two weeks later, after incrementally ramping up, every server responding to user requests was updated!
Testing
When doing upgrades like this it’s of course very important to test everything to make sure that the code behaves in the same way, and we had a couple of approaches to this.
Phan. In this project, we used it to find code in our codebase that would be incompatible with PHP 7. It made it very easy to find the low-hanging fruit and fix those issues.
We also have a suite of unit and integration tests that helped a lot in identifying what wasn’t working the way it used to. And since normal development continued alongside this project, we needed to make sure no new code was added that wasn’t PHP 7-proof, so we set up our CI tasks to run all tests on both PHP 5 and PHP 7.
Results
So at the end of this rollout, what were the final results? Well, two things stand out as big improvements for us; performance and language features.
Performance
When we rolled PHP 7 out to the first batch of servers we obviously kept a very close eye at the various graphs we have to make sure things are running smoothly. As we mentioned above, we were looking for performance improvements, but the real-world result was striking. Almost immediately saw the latency drop by half, and the CPU load on the servers decrease at least 50%, often more. Not only were our servers serving pages twice as fast, they were doing it using half the amount of CPU resources.
These are graphs from one of the servers that handle our API. As you can see, the latency dropped to less than half, and the load average at peak is now lower than it’s previous lowest point!
Language features
PHP 7 also brings a lot of fun new features that can make the life of the developers at Tumblr a bit easier. Some highlights are:
Scalar type hints: PHP has historically been fairly poor for type safety, PHP 7 introduces scalar type hints which ensures values passed around conform to specific types (string, bool, int, float, etc).
Return type declarations: Now, with PHP 7, functions can have explicit return types that the language will enforce. This reduces the need for some boilerplate code and manually checking the return values from functions.
Anonymous classes: Much like anonymous functions (closures), anonymous classes are constructed at runtime and can simulate a class, conforming to interfaces and even extending other classes. These are great for utility objects like logging classes and useful in unit tests.
Various security & performance enhancements across the board.
Every so often, our Legal and Policy teams review Tumblr’s Community Guidelines to make sure they’re crisp, clear, and—most important of all—an accurate reflection of our community and its values.
Here’s a quick summary of some changes we’ve made (which you can see in detail over on GitHub):
Clarified our policy around promoting terrorism (don’t do it).
Reinforced our policy on posting non-consensual pornography (don’t do it).
Updated our harassment policy to reflect our improved block feature.
Added a dormancy policy to release URLs and archive long-term inactive blogs.
Have a look, and feel free to email policy@tumblr.com with any questions or concerns. Thank you!
Some users are experiencing a service disruption affecting aspects of the site, causing gateway errors on reblogs among other issues. Sorry for the continued inconvenience - We’ll get it fixed ASAP.
