Sped Da Wod

Sped da wod

So About Tumblr Blaze

As the new Tumblr feature has rolled out, everyone’s been having a lot of fun seeing ad pvp, gay hobbits, random people’s pets, and even the limited time weed discount. But uh. I’ve discovered something potentially really bad about Blaze.

Blaze does not filter blocked tags.

Luckily I don’t have any tags blocked for serious reasons–I block the furry tag because blocking nsfw wasn’t enough to keep sketch art off what the algorithm wanted for my dash, and I block homestuck because. Well I don’t even know why; I click every post with it but like. it’s there as a warning or something I don’t know.

ANYWAYS I’ve gotten ads for both of these tags, one a furry artist with open commissions (their art was great, good on them for advertising an actual product /gen) and the other an ad for the Homestuck Discord server. Neither of them were blocked on my dashboard.

This is an important issue because of the way Tumblr is filtering Blaze posts. While Blaze posts are put through a screening process, it’s not very vigorous. One post tagged ‘sex’ and another containing the entire Bee Movie script were allowed past the filters. As with the previous ads, these ads in particular are fine. However, Tumblr’s leniency with this can cause issues to people blocking tags for serious reasons. For example, a post tagged unreality and boosted using Blaze would still show up on somebody’s dash who needs it filtered.

So, what do we do? Let me be clear, I am escatic for Blaze to roll out for all users. I think it’s a fantastic idea. In addition, I don’t want the solution to be “better” screening for Blaze posts. Tumblr has always been the website that lets you say die. I want to keep it as such. However, I think it’s very important that @staff try to please implement a feature within Blaze that allows ads to be filtered by blocked tags. Either by checking if a user is blocking a tag before selecting them to see it, or by blocking it on their dash. Clearly the first is ideal but I’m not a web developer (I’m barely a developer at all), so whatever can be done to make sure this feature can be implemented safely is important to me.

Thanks for reading this if you did, I’m not sure how to get the word out but I want people to be informed before anything bad potentially happens.