RIP Tumblr

I've been holding off on making a formal post about the Tumblr situation. The main reason is that I immediately launched an appeal to Tumblr support, and have been waiting to hear back for days. I know that the people who work for Tumblr are all very busy, and I do hate to interrupt nap time, but I was hoping that they would deliver a judgement fairly quickly. If I regained control of the old blog, I could simply redirect people, instead of having to wait for everyone to realize this one exists. However, there has been no sign of the support staff getting back to me at all, and I'm not going to wait the rest of my life for them.

In case you're unaware, the old site got shut down because of certain comments that you could arguably classify as racist, if you had an IQ somewhere in the negative range. I'm obviously not going to go over them in detail, or explain much of the context, in case I trip another hate speech filter. There were two posts that got me in trouble: In one post, I shortened the word Japanese to make a sentence flow better. In another, I said that it would be stupid to be offended by that. And then (because this was relevant to the question), I used a certain other word in a completely neutral context, when talking about how people overreact to any mention of it whatsoever.

These questions were asked on November 5th and 8th, respectively. I suddenly got emails notifying me that they had been taken down on the 23rd, at 3:29 and 3:41 P.M., EST. These emails said:

Please note that subsequent violations of our Community Guidelines may result in account termination.

After this, I answered two questions, and made a post explaining the situation. On November 24th, at 2:16 P.M. (less than 24 hours after the warnings, and with no further infractions), I received word that my account had been terminated:

We've terminated your Tumblr account. As per the policies you agreed to when creating a Tumblr account, we do not allow hate speech on Tumblr.

From our Community Guidelines:

Don't encourage violence or hatred. Don't post content for the purpose of promoting or inciting the hatred of, or dehumanizing, individuals or groups based on race, ethnic or national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, disability, or disease.

As mentioned before, I then contacted support, but it has not achieved anything yet. So in short, I said that people overreact to a word, and they reacted to it by banning me, with no appeal. Thank God I didn't venture a strong opinion. They probably would've hired a hitman.

This will be the replacement site for the foreseeable future. I luckily had enough time to download the whole blog before they took it down, and I've used that to restore the last month's worth of posts. I've also rigged up a primitive replacement for the Ask feature. I am still taking suggestions for alternate services to use. The essential criteria are:

• An actual blog format, as opposed to an expanded Twitter clone
• Pagination
• The ability to customize the layout or CSS, so that I can have pages like "Complete Patches"
• Either an inbuilt ask feature, or a separate service that can be embedded on a contact page
• Stability and reliability as a service

In case this happens again, I now have a Twitter account, which you can always find on the sidebar. This way, even if the blog gets taken down, I can still have bitter, angry arguments over nothing of importance. I will also be posting patch updates to Twitter, so remember to like, share, comment, subscribe, ring that bell, and give me that sweet, sweet validation my daddy never did.