Tumblr Account Terminated
Posted May 26, 2020 13:59:00 GMT -7
Post by Nergal on May 26, 2020 13:59:00 GMT -7
Today my 7+ year old tumblr account was terminated.
Upon re-reading both the Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines, twice, I'm relatively certain that that action which I know caused the account to be banned was not actually any violation.
I posted a service referral link, with no additional advertising or misdirection, just site homepage with my reference id; and clicked on it to make sure the link followed through properly, it did not because tumblr immediately froze and redirected me to an account termination message.
How dare I attempt to monetize a photography blog by means of Shutterstock.
Maybe the site flags freshly created blogs to prevent spam, but I had to go through a captcha to create the alternate blog; they could have stopped me from posting the link altogether if their backend REGEX system is going to declare it to be "dangerous" anyway when clicked upon; they could have LOCKED the account and emailed me with a slap on the wrist, as my account should otherwise have been entirely in good standing, but even using a "magic link," (two-factor authentication, via email) as they call it, to attempt to log back in: I am greeted by the account has been terminated message and a prompt to get in touch with their support team if I have questions.
I don't presently feel the need to amend the situation though. Tumblr has been going downhill for a LONG time, and deciding to build a house on a sinking ship, just because that ship is familiar, was never a good idea anyway...
I learned to navigate that hellscape, in ways my peers had never considered; as such I can confirm that each of the blogs which were owned by my account are well scrubbed from the publicly viewable portions of the site. I can still navigate public blogs as I normally would, so I haven't been IP banned but my blogs holding a collective of over 27k posts cannot be viewed even in archive format.
It takes tumblr hours, and sometimes DAYS, to remove your content when you request it; but when you get banned that archive disappears nearly instantaneously. Which is actually incredibly useful information for people who are trying to delete their blogs, it might still be recoverable through the support team but it sure was fast.
The only somewhat active use of those blogs of mine, in a few years now, has been image hosting. That hosting was done mostly for this forum, as of writing this the links are still live. Here's one post which I can use as a litmus test, to check if my content is still alive and well on their backend servers: old post using tumblr image link
It seems that they are going to continue hosting my files for the time being, seems like copyright infringement to me but as long as my posts aren't full of image not found errors in the immediate future I don't necessarily care. But when they do break, here's documentation for why.
27k in 7 years, no let's say 8 for argument's sake, over 3300 posts per year, averaging out to over 9 posts (mostly re-blogged material) per day.
There's going to be A LOT of broken follow-through links when people are following a chain of posts back up through my accounts; those broken chains are a well-known issue, devs never fixed it, I reiterate: dying service.
Although.... with a terminated account, I am technically no longer bound by their user agreements.... there have been multiple projects which I passed on over the years, solely because I didn't want to do anything questionable to jeopardize my account..... hmm.... nah, kekekekek
Upon re-reading both the Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines, twice, I'm relatively certain that that action which I know caused the account to be banned was not actually any violation.
I posted a service referral link, with no additional advertising or misdirection, just site homepage with my reference id; and clicked on it to make sure the link followed through properly, it did not because tumblr immediately froze and redirected me to an account termination message.
How dare I attempt to monetize a photography blog by means of Shutterstock.
Maybe the site flags freshly created blogs to prevent spam, but I had to go through a captcha to create the alternate blog; they could have stopped me from posting the link altogether if their backend REGEX system is going to declare it to be "dangerous" anyway when clicked upon; they could have LOCKED the account and emailed me with a slap on the wrist, as my account should otherwise have been entirely in good standing, but even using a "magic link," (two-factor authentication, via email) as they call it, to attempt to log back in: I am greeted by the account has been terminated message and a prompt to get in touch with their support team if I have questions.
I don't presently feel the need to amend the situation though. Tumblr has been going downhill for a LONG time, and deciding to build a house on a sinking ship, just because that ship is familiar, was never a good idea anyway...
I learned to navigate that hellscape, in ways my peers had never considered; as such I can confirm that each of the blogs which were owned by my account are well scrubbed from the publicly viewable portions of the site. I can still navigate public blogs as I normally would, so I haven't been IP banned but my blogs holding a collective of over 27k posts cannot be viewed even in archive format.
It takes tumblr hours, and sometimes DAYS, to remove your content when you request it; but when you get banned that archive disappears nearly instantaneously. Which is actually incredibly useful information for people who are trying to delete their blogs, it might still be recoverable through the support team but it sure was fast.
The only somewhat active use of those blogs of mine, in a few years now, has been image hosting. That hosting was done mostly for this forum, as of writing this the links are still live. Here's one post which I can use as a litmus test, to check if my content is still alive and well on their backend servers: old post using tumblr image link
It seems that they are going to continue hosting my files for the time being, seems like copyright infringement to me but as long as my posts aren't full of image not found errors in the immediate future I don't necessarily care. But when they do break, here's documentation for why.
27k in 7 years, no let's say 8 for argument's sake, over 3300 posts per year, averaging out to over 9 posts (mostly re-blogged material) per day.
There's going to be A LOT of broken follow-through links when people are following a chain of posts back up through my accounts; those broken chains are a well-known issue, devs never fixed it, I reiterate: dying service.
Although.... with a terminated account, I am technically no longer bound by their user agreements.... there have been multiple projects which I passed on over the years, solely because I didn't want to do anything questionable to jeopardize my account..... hmm.... nah, kekekekek
