This post is part rant and part request for help.
As regular tumblr browers may know, they’ve started getting a lot more aggressive about walling off adult content. Their general rule is that adult sites should only be accessible to anyone logged into a tumblr account. The application of this rule seems somewhat haphazard to date, but there’s a clear trend here, and ultimately all tumblr adult content is going to be accessed this way. Presumably this is so they have an easy line of defense if the morality police – AKA annoying assholes who want to project their own sexual problems onto everyone else – decide to go after them.
Now having to log into tumblr is annoying but not a deal breaker for me. Creating a tumblr account is pretty quick and easy. What is driving me insane is the new web browsing experience for these sites. I don’t get the site customized, full-screen tumblr experience. I get a narrow strip on the right hand side of my dashboard with an endless scroll of large images. For example, alternativefemdom used to display as a dozen or so images per screen in a grid. Now I can only get one image per screen in a stupid cramped strip on the right side of my dashboard. It makes browsing it a miserable experience and destroys any UI customization the tumblr owner did. There’s no longer a sense of a site identity, just a hard to view list of images.
Is this what everyone is new experiencing on tumblr? Am I missed some configuration option? And if so, are there any alternative options for viewing adult tumblr sites? I can’t tell if in creating this horrible user experience the tumblr developers are being malicious, nefarious or simply incompetent.
This was an image I found on the alternativefemdom tumblr, right before the annoying UI drove me away from it.
i have also noticed this behaviour of tumblr on osme blogs fo the ast year or so … and it annoys me a lot! Sometime it changes back to full screen for some blogs, but mostly it does not ..
and yes – Tumblr is detroying its usefulness to “us”
To be fair to tumblr, after further research, I think it’s a function of a owner selected privacy setting (see my post update). But it is frustrating they’ve done such a dumb implementation of the feature in the web browser. It’s definitely becoming a worse user experience as you say.
-paltego
hey…I like your blog and been a fan for sometime now…is there a way to send you a message privately or an email ?
Sure – paltego@gmail.com
Yeah, I find it does that on some tumblrs, not others. As far as I’m aware, it’s not to do with ‘adult’ ratings but is something in the blogger’s page formatting that was probably not intentional. There has been some discussion of it and it sounds like it’s a bug, not a feature because literally nobody wants to read like that.
If you just want the images, not all the notes and so on, there are various viewers.
This one does thumbnails: http://www.tumblrview.com
This just fills your screen with images: http://www.tumblviewr.com/Tumblr/Blog/servitor-again
In both of them you have to type in the short name (from the URL, not the blog title). I’ve provided one (selected at random) in that second one to start off.
S
Thanks Servitor. I tried the tumblrview site, but it doesn’t seem to work on the specific sites I had problems with (e.g. alternativefemdom). Like you said, it’s not actually to do with the adult setting. My best guess is that it’s to do with a well hidden setting that they call ‘privacy’. I don’t really understand the feature as they describe it or why they’ve implemented it the way they have, but that seems to be correlation with the weird browsing experience.
-paltego
It’s an extra step but it’s easy to get around.
1) When the panel comes up on the right side it displays the owners url in the top left of the panel – Right Click on that URL and select “open in a new tab”.
2) Switch to the new tab that has been opened and you have it full screen.
3) add /Archive onto the end of the URL in the address bar to get the full archive view.
You can add /archive onto the end of any tumblr URL – even if their UI doesn’t have an Archive link.
Thanks. You’re right that you can normally add ‘/archive’ to the end and get the full archive view, but I don’t think this is right in the specific case here. For example, try going here: http://alternativefemdom.tumblr.com/archive
If your web browser behaves like mine, you’ll get redirected and end up back at your dashboard with a linear list of the tumblr posts on the right side. No archive in sight. If you don’t get that, and can actually see the archive, then please let me know! That’d be confusing, but would also show me this was an issues around how I’m accessing tumblr rather than a general problem!
-paltego
I have noticed that if I go to the Tumblr dashboard and switch SafeMode to’Off’ , Tumblr cannot remember my settings between session and I have to log in to show I am an adult each time.
Google and yahoo can remember settings between sessions so why not Tumblr?
Although you have to login to be able to access most of the porn-based tumblr accounts, they do not have to be viewed in your personal tumblr feed.
I have created a series of html pages that reside on my own computer and group together the links to all the sites I visit. If I select a tumblr site without being logged in, I get the tumblr ‘safe’ mode type screen, I then login to my account, and immediately after the page opens I stop the feed. I can now use the links from my personal html pages, or my saved bookmarks, to open these sites in a separate browser tab in their full glory, not in the irritating single file row that your feed gives you. I do not save sites to my personal feed. I just add some code to my own html pages (can be done with minimal coding knowledge and a text editor, like notepad) or save the URL as a bookmark. I log out of my tumblr feed when I am finished … er…browsing.
It varies from blog to blog and I believe it has to do w/the person’s settings as to whether the blog is public or private. My experience has been that private blogs requiring a person to log in first and proving they are an adult, view in the way you have expressed, and the public blogs, meaning those available w/o signing in, seem to appear in full screen.
The previous authour, Budman, is correct, by adding archive to the title one gets to view the author’s posts by month.
Let me add, that I, too, enjoy your blog and view it daily. It is well written, informative, and holds an opinion, thank you.
Glad you like it and glad it prompted you to start blogging stuff yourself. Always nice to get some positive feedback!
Like I said in my reply to Budman, I’m not sure the ‘archive’ approach does actually work in this case. I’d be very interested to hear if you can access the archive pages of the problem sites (e.g. alternativefemdom). As I wrote in a later post, I think there’s some weirdness with a privacy setting that is screwing the user experience here.
-paltego
Let me add, it was instrumental in starting my Tumblr blog. I know, I know, not quite the same thing, but it was a prompt.
I’ve had the same problem, and spent several frustrating hours trying to track down the cause. Apparently, there is an option under Tumblr blog settings to ‘hide’ the blog from users who are not logged in, presumably for privacy reasons; the side-effect of this choice seems to be that said blogs only appear on the Tumblr ‘dashboard’ through the side panel. Very annoying.
Thanks for comment. Like I said in the follow-up post, I think there’s a couple of different things at work here. The adult setting requires people to be logged in, but does at least give a reasonable UI when that is done. The privacy setting is what I think is screwing up other cases (although I’m still not entirely sure that’s the only issue here).
-paltego