In case you’re not aware, Tumblr has recently announced that on the seventeenth of December they’ll start purging all porn and porn-adjacent content on Tumblr.  Why does that matter to LWU, you ask?  Well, they’re using their bots to identify it, and we’ve all seen how well THAT works.  One of my Wander posts even got flagged as sensitive for no apparent reason.  What I want to do is reassure you all that I’ve taken steps to back up all of the content on LWU to my hard drive using a tool I was recommended a couple weeks ago.  I’m going to continue to do so on a regular basis just in case, so there’s very little chance that my stuff will be lost.

I’m using this one!  It condensed my entire blog as of November 20th into one 4.36 gigabyte folder.

Any notes on how to use it? I can’t figure it out.

Okay, so here’s how to do this.

First off, go here and make sure you have Python installed.  For Windows it should be the very bottom link, the x86 MSI Installer.  You don’t have to do anything but install it.

Second, go here, and click “Clone or Download” (the green button on the right).  Select “Download ZIP”.

Make sure you have WinRAR or 7zip or something installed that lets you extract zip files.

Next, make a folder on your desktop.  I named mine “Tumblr Backup”, and in the following instructions I’m going to assume that’s what you’ve named yours as well; replace “Tumblr Backup” with whatever you name yours if it isn’t.

Drop the zip file you downloaded into Tumblr Backup.  Go in and extract it; this should create a folder called “tumblr-utils-master“.

Open your Command Prompt.  If you don’t know how to find that, click your start menu button and type “CMD”, which should give you this:

That should open this:

That frog over there is blotting out my profile name on my computer.  Whatever your profile name is when you sign in (e.g. “Max” or “Snugglebuns” or “froglord69”) is going to be in that spot on the address path.  If it instead says something about Windows and System 32, that’s okay, what I’m gonna tell you to do will go to the right place either way.

Next, input this command–keeping in mind that the parts in bold should be changed based on your profile name and what you named the folder on your desktop:

CD C:\Users\froglord69\Desktop\Tumblr Backup\tumblr-utils-master

There!  Now you’re in the right folder!  Next, enter this command, replacing the bolded bit with your own blog name:

tumblr_backup.py yourblogname

You should see this:

Then just…let it run!  It took less than five minutes for my computer, though it will vary by processor and connection.  Once it’s done, you’ll have something like this:

That “index” opens in an internet browser.  It’s basically a webpage stored directly on your computer.  Some pics of mine:

So…not pretty, but it’ll save the content of your posts.  Hope this helps!

Spread this so as many people as possible can see it

Mac users:

Mac instructions for you weirdo Mac users!

Oh thank gods, I needed those mac instructions. THANK YOU.

THIS WORKS!!! (Windows, at least. I haven’t tried Mac)

This worked better for me than some other instructions floating around, so reblobbing in case anyone else is having problems.

For those that need it~

Cullen in Winterfell

Okay, but super tall girlfriend

 Lobbyists are pushing a bill that would be super bad for copyright. Think SOPA and Article 13 + 11 meshed together. Like THAT bad.

It’s called H.R. 1695/S.1010, and what it would do is allow the president to appoint who will be the next Register of Copyrights. Right now that office is under the control of the Library of Congress. It’s a non-political position. But Hollywood has been lobbying hard to get this into a political position.

Whoever Trump picks is obviously going to be someone who bows to the whims of Hollywood and pushes for things like website blocking, upload filters, etc. It’s bad. It’s like BAD bad.

Anyway, it’s heading into a Senate committee meeting on December 12. I’m not going to lie, it looks dire. BUT it hasn’t passed the committee yet so it’s not headed to the Senate yet so I mean idk, let’s TRY to at least get them to not pass this law?

Dial 1-916-823-9612 and enter your zip code to call your Senators and ask they stop this legislation before a crucial committee vote.

You can email your representatives here.

However, calling is the most effective.

All o this dragon age hype made me miss… them..

so i redrew this 2 years later

Censored on tumblr

What all ask boxes look like for me (submission boxes look exactly the same):

Left: what happens when I try to open dms (New Message does nothing); I can’t even read them. Right: when I try to go to someone’s dms from their blog.

Neither new things I post nor old things I post show up in the tags they’re in, even if they were before.

I can type things into replies, but it won’t actually post them.

Since it doesn’t seem this one has been encountered by many people yet, maybe reblog this so people know about it. I’m probably getting deleted though

Tumblr is shadowbanning people and they aren’t even trying to be subtle about it.

Please spread the word.

I’m glad this is spreading but simultaneously it makes it sound like the shadowban is much less severe than it is because I didn’t realize, and this shadowban is so severe I can’t even add on / tell anyone that.

All my likes, reblogs, and replies are hidden from the notes of EVERY post.

When I like or rb things it doesn’t show notes in someone’s activity / dash, except long-time followers (not sure about the exact cutoff/conditions).

If I reblogged and added something to this from a non-follower they wouldn’t even know. Check and see: my rb’s don’t even show up in the notes. So people couldn’t even find out I added something on by checking the notes either:

Not to mention: I’m hidden from all searches, can’t be @’d, past @’s of me are hidden from my notes, I don’t get notified when people reply to a post I replied to, my @’s don’t give notes, and every search on my blog is blanked. I can’t even ask/submit to myself even with anons, and lots more.

Oh, yeah, and: MY BLOG ISN’T EVEN MARKED NSFW. Every flagged post I’ve found was restored. But every flagged post you contest brings attention to you that risks you just getting shadowbanned randomly.

THIS is the version that should get spread around…

If anyone is interested in the Dragon Age games, and owns an Xbox,

DA II is currently available FOR FREE DOWNLOAD with Xbox live membership!!! 🤩

Help spread the word: Obamacare deadline for health care coverage in 2019 is December 15. Pass it on.

on fandom and content policing

So, listen.

While we’re all having a good laugh and/or panic at tumblr’s incompetent censorship implosion, I just want to take this opportunity to draw a parallel to a lot of the recent fandom wank about what content should or shouldn’t be allowed on AO3. Specifically: there’s a lot of people who want the Archive to ban particular types of fic, but who have no real understanding of how you would actually implement that in practice.

While there are legitimate arguments to be made about the unwisdom of tumblr’s soon-to-be-forbidden content choices - the whole “female-presenting nipples” thing and the apparent decision to prioritise banning tits over banning Nazis, for instance - the functional problem isn’t that they’ve decided to monitor specific types of content, but that they’ve got no sensible way of enacting their own policies. Quite clearly, you can’t entrust the process to bots: just today, I’ve seen flagged content that runs the gamut from Star Trek: TOS screenshots to paleo fish art to quilts to the entire chronic pain tag to a text post about a gay family member with AIDS - and at the same time, I’ve still been seeing porn gifs on my dash. 

It’s absolute chaos, which is what happens when you try to outsource to programs the type of work that can only reliably be done by people - and even then, there’s still going to be bad or dubious or unpopular decisions made, because invariably, some things will need to be judged on a case by case basis, and people don’t always agree on where the needle should fall. 

Now: consider that this is happening because tumblr is banning particular types of images. Images, at least, you can kiiiiinda moderate by bots, provided you’re using the bot-process as a filter to cut down on the amount of work done by actual humans, and also provided you’re willing to take a huge credibility hit given the poor initial accuracy of said bots, but: images. Bots can be sorta trained to recognise and sort those, right?

But the kind of AI sophistication you’d need to moderate all the content on a text-based site like AO3? That… yeah. That literally doesn’t exist, and going by tags and keywords wouldn’t help you either, because there’d be no handy way to distinguish what type of usage was present just on that basis alone. Posts about content generated by neural nets are hilarious precisely because our AI isn’t there yet, and based on what we’ve seen so far, we won’t be there for a good long while.  

It’s a point I’ve made again and again, but I’m going to reiterate it here: it’s always easy to conjure up the most obvious, extreme and clear-cut examples of undesirable content when you’re discussing bans in theory, but in practice, you need to have a feasible means of enacting those rules with some degree of accuracy, speed and accountability that’s attainable within both budget and context, or else the whole thing becomes pointless. 

On massive sites like AO3 and tumblr, the considerable expense of monitoring so much user-generated content with paid employees is, to a degree, obviated by the concept of tagging and blocking, the idea being that users can curate and control their own experience to avoid unpleasant material. There still needs to be oversight, of course - at absolute minimum, a code of conduct and a means of reporting those who violate it to a human authority in a position to enforce said code - but the thing is, given how much raw content accrues on social media and at what speed, you really need these policies to be in place, and actively enforced, from the get-go: otherwise, when you finally do start trying to moderate, you’ll have to wade through the entire site’s backlog while also trying to keep abreast of new content.

Facebook, which is a multi-billion dollar corporation, can afford to have paid human moderators in place for assessing content violations instead of relying on bots; however, it is also notoriously terrible at both following its own standards and setting them in the first place. To take an example salient to the tumblr mess, Facebook has an ongoing problem with how it handles breastfeeding posts, while its community standards regarding what counts as hate speech are, uhhh… Not Great. Twitter has similarly struggled with bot accounts proliferating during multiple recent elections and with the seemingly simple task of deplatforming Nazis - not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to take a quote-on-quote political stance, even for the sake of cleaning house. 

It’s also because, quite frankly, neither Facebook nor Twitter were originally thought of as entities that would one day be ubiquitous and powerful enough to be used to sway elections; and when that capability was first realised by those with enough money and power to take advantage of it, there were no internal safeguards to stop it happening, and not nearly enough external comprehension of or appreciation for the risks among those in positions of authority to impose some in time to make a difference. Because even though time spent scrolling through social media passes like reverse dog years - which is to say, two hours can frequently feel like ten minutes - its impact is such that we fall into the trap of thinking that it’s been around forever, instead of being a really recent phenomenon. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, tumblr in 2007, AO3 in 2009, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, tinder in 2012, Discord in 2015. Even Livejournal, that precursor blog-and-fandom space, only began in 1999, with the purge of strikethrough happening in 2007. Long-term, we’re still running a global beta on How To Do Social Media Without Fucking Up, because this whole internet thing is still producing new iterations of old problems that we’ve never had to deal with in this medium before - or if so, then not on this scale, within whatever specific parameters apply to each site, in conjunction with whatever else is happening that’s relevant, with whatever tools or budget we have to hand. It is messy, and I really don’t see that changing anytime soon.   

All of which is a way of saying that, while it’s far from impossible to moderate content on social media, you need to have actual humans doing it, a clear reporting process set up, a coherent set of rules, a willingness to enforce those rules consistently - or at least to explain the logic behind any changes or exceptions and then stand by them, too - and the humility to admit that, whatever you planned for your site to be at the outset, success will mean that it invariably grows beyond that mandate in potentially strange and unpredictable ways, which will in turn require active thought and anticipation on your part to successfully deal with.

Which is why, compared to what’s happening on other sites, the objections being raised about AO3 are so goddamn frustrating - because, right from the outset, it has had a clear set of rules: it’s just not one that various naysayers like. Content-wise, the whole idea of the tagging system, as stated in the user agreement, is that you enter at your own risk: you are meant to navigate your own experience using the tools the site has provided - tools it has constantly worked to upgrade as the site traffic has boomed exponentially - and there’s a reporting process in place for people who transgress otherwise. AO3 isn’t perfect - of course it isn’t - but it is coherent, which is exactly what tumblr, in enacting this weird nipple-purge, has failed to be. 

Plus and also: the content on AO3 is fictional. As passionate as I am about the impact of stories on reality and vice versa, this is nonetheless a salient distinction to point out when discussing how to manage AO3 versus something like Twitter or tumblr. Different types of content require different types of moderation: the more variety in media formats and subject matter and the higher the level of complex, real-time, user-user interaction, the harder it is to manage - and, quite arguably, the more managing it requires in the first place. Whereas tumblr has reblogs, open inboxes and instant messaging, interactions on AO3 are limited to comments and that’s it: users can lock, moderate or throw their own comment threads open as they choose, and that, in turn, cuts down on how much active moderation is necessary.   

tl;dr: moderating social media sites is actually a lot harder and more complicated than most people realise, and those lobbying for tighter content control in places like AO3 should look at how broad generalisations about what constitutes a Bad Post are backfiring now before claiming the whole thing is an easy fix.

The idea of banning things by tag on AO3 is terrifying–you’re just going to get the questionable content untagged, then, and that’s the worst option.

What’s interesting to me as an Old, who went through Strikethrough on LJ, is seeing how it’s being remembered now in the Discourse here on Tumblr. I’m seeing a bunch of “it was a lot of people who wanted to post child porn” and ok yes that is certainly a take one could have. I’m also seeing “fandom should police itself!” and again, yes, that is certainly a take.

Pull up a chair, friends, let’s discuss.

What people forget about Strikethrough is that while fandom was Loud As Fuck and also, yes, ridiculous (I thought so at the time for that matter I mean COME THE FUCK ON there was a theme song) and possibly the most widely affected group of people, fandom was not the most *profoundly* affected group of people. See, LJ was working off a list of journals handed to them by the group “Warriors For Innocence” who as far as anyone could tell just kinda…searched for some words? And let me tell you, friends, WfI did not distinguish between Harry Potter fanfic that involved Dumbledore and Harry in compromising positions and communities of child sexual abuse survivors. Those second communities? They got shut down, too. So did communities of sexual assault survivors, because one of the words that got targeted was “rape”.

It’s just that the communities of survivors did not have a theme song and icon sets and of course it’s not nearly as ~funny~ and ~woke~ for y’all to have your hot takes about how AO3 and DreamWidth were founded by a bunch of people angry their child porn got taken away when you factor in that survivors were getting hit, too. Kinda like Tumblr is protecting the children now but it’s harming eg sex workers who are following the rules.

None of the communities I was in got lost because of fandom. No, the community I was in that got deleted was sexual assault survivors. Where we were all trying to come to terms with what had happened to us and suddenly, boom, we were told that having “sexual assault” and “rape” in the community interests so that survivors could even find the place was *soliciting illegal activity*. Yeah. That was fun.

As for fandom policing itself, what exactly do people intend by that? Fandom has always had lengthy discussions about what’s acceptable, they were going on in 2007 around Strikethrough. At great and interminable and occasionally kind of nauseating length. One thing we’ve learned in the past 11 years though is that if you provide a reporting mechanism on a platform, it will immediately be weaponized to silence marginalized voices; cf the fash pulling their brigading on Twitter. People have always spoken up and said “that is really not ok” and others have always responded “we disagree” and the arguments have gone on and on and on and the only thing we’ve learned is that asking for platforms to give us a mechanism to report things ends up being weaponized to hurt people who don’t have a damn thing to do with the problem we’re trying to control.

All I really have for everyone for whom Tumblr’s TOS change is their first experience with this kind of thing is hey, listen, the *actual* history is important. Not what you think you know, not the hot takes and the super woke one sentence versions going around – know what actually went down when LJ pulled this shit, and who got hurt the worst by it. Because it wasn’t the Supernatural and Harry Potter fandoms, even though they were the ones being extremely loud and quoting “Hoist the Colors” and making banners and icons (it was a different time, ok). “Protect the children” as a motto will always be used in such a way that it will hurt people who are already marginalized and vulnerable and hurting, we’ve seen it before and we’re seeing it again and already we’re seeing the hot takes about how it’s perfectly acceptable because what’s wrong with you, do you want child porn?

And that’s why all of us who were around for Strikethrough and, for that matter, the actual birth of Tumblr, are tired. We’ve been here before. We’ve heard it all before, word for word. We know who’s going to get hurt, again. We wish people would freakin learn.

How To: See All Your Published Posts That Got Flagged

Hi Tumblr, I’m back with another script after last night. This time it comes with actual instructions :P I recorded a demo video of the script running. It’s available here: https://flight-of-the-felix.tumblr.com/post/180811718885/demo-for-the-tumblr-flagging-tester

For those familiar with Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey, this is a known process. If not, follow these steps:

1. Install the tampermonkey browser extension via the official site. 2. Click the toolbar button, press Dashboard. 3. From the Dashboard, press the plus sign in the horizontal toolbar. 4. Replace all text in the editor with the code of the script, available here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/boisei0/2ea7d7145d04a1cc5864d316271d09fd/raw/tumblr_flagging_score_checker.js 5. Click File -> Save. The script should now enable itself. 6. Close the tab with the editor. 7. Open a new tab with the Tumblr dashboard: https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard and wait until the script is fully loaded and the black-with-white box is displayed. 8. Follow the instructions on the screen.

Since this script will now run every time you open the tumblr dashboard, disable it again after usage: With the dashboard open, click the toolbar button for Tampermonkey. Now click the switch to disable the “tumblr score checker 2.0” again. In case of problems, click the tampermonkey button, and ask if there are updates.

Common problems and how to ask for help

Q: You keep getting an error message saying you are rate limited. A: Click the tampermonkey button, click Dashboard, and click the flagging script in the list. Around line 16 you find the following: const debug = false; const debugFlag = -1; Replace false with true, and replace -1 with 3. Save the script, and reload the tumblr dashboard. If you’re on Mac with Chrome, do command+option+J, Windows with Chrome ctrl+shift+J, Mac with Firefox command+shift+J, Windows with Firefox ctrl+shift+J. (Rest I don’t know from mind, look up “developer console YourBrowser” on google to get the shortcut). If you run XKit you’re going to see a lot of spam first, scroll down to the end and take a screnshot of the last couple lines you see. It should be 2 numbers. The first is the total amount of posts, the second the number of requests needed to look at every post listed. Check if the number of posts is indeed correct, and take a screenshot of the output. Send it to me in DM, and I’ll look along with you for a way to fix this.

Q: Your blogs are not getting listed, or twice. A: Refresh the page and try again. If it persists, look at the previous question and change the -1 to 1 instead. Follow the rest of the steps and send me a screenshot in DM. I’ve seen this before, but it appears to only randomly happen and I haven’t managed to solve this yet.

Should I use this?

As for those wondering about “what am I going to run on my tumblr, is it even save?”, if you would like to feel free to check the code, but what it does is get the so called “form key” from the page (tumblr uses it internally to communicate between pages, e.g. xkit uses it too). Next, this form key is used in combination with the part of the server that loads blogs in the sidebar view. The loading code returned by the server has information about whether or not posts are flagged, and a lot of extra information.

Also feel free to spread this script around :)

Some screenshots for additional guidance are placed below

@dalishious

I’m gonna try this right now! I’m not sure how to request posts be reviewed, though. I’ll have to figure that part out next. Thank you for the @

I added a couple more color options to Lady Josephine, available on Nexus. 

(I had to remove the link because the post wasn’t showing in results…aaand still isn’t lol X-P)

Diplomat: honoring her default color scheme of navy blue, yellow, brown, gold, and white  Grove: earthy shades of green, brown, tan, gold, and ivory

Hope you enjoy X)

Fenris has made enough progress to start reading advanced level tragedies.. but he’s not enjoying it.