Tumblr changed the way you contact support without telling anybody.
[Suicidal content trigger warning]
OK so I was scrolling through Tumblr last night [April 7th 2019] on my phone, minding my own business, when I read a few posts from someone I follow. And going by the content of the stuff they were saying, they were clearly suicidal or at imminent risk of self-harm or possibly even suicide.
So I did the usual drill for when I see stuff like that: I went to report the post to @staff and @support so that the user could get the help that they needed and access emergency resources.
And that involved having to fart about with a stupid fucking form, “tick all the panels with traffic lights in them” CAPTCHA and all. Then, when I went to press [submit], it fucking wouldn’t, no matter how many times I pressed the button. It just did the usual little “loading” animation for less than a second and reverted back to a [submit] button again.
Then I remembered that Tumblr had a support email: [email protected]. So I went to the next plan and wrote to Tumblr support, linking the concerning user and posts and that they were possibly suicidal or at risk of self harm, in need of urgent help. yadda yadda yadda, send!
So thinking that was that and expecting nothing back but the usual “We’ve got your email and we’ll get to it at some point” message, I put my phone down and went to sleep.
I woke up this morning and checked my emails to see if there was any possible response. All I got was this spit-back email, telling me to use the fucky form again.
In other words, Tumblr literally changed the way you contact them to report bugs, to report law-breaking content (e.g. child p0/rn), to get blogs mistakenly-marked NSFW put back up again and decided that the best way to do this would be to keep it secret.
Not to mention the fact that I was reporting a user who was quite possibly suicidal and in need of serious help. The 9 hour difference between me seeing that and the report actually getting through (through using the computer I’m on now—the user’s risk status is unknown at the time of writing) could literally be the difference between that person living or dying.
Seriously Tumblr, please step up your game.
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