Communities closed beta is here
Hello again! Weâre back with an update on Communities, a big idea we had last year that weâve been working on steadily since then. Weâre abnormally jazzed to announce that weâre beginning a âclosed betaâ phase of this new feature, which means many of you will get to play with it soon!
We want to build this whole thing together, with as much input from all of you as possible. Weâve read and re-read the feedback from our previous post, and weâve been surveying and interviewing people about this idea for a few months now. But itâs time to open this up even more for hands-on testing.
Weâve already begun reaching out to most of you who interacted with our previous post, as promised, with a survey asking whether youâd be interested in helping (check your email!). Over the next couple of weeks, weâll be using the results of that survey to narrow down who weâd like to help test Communities in these initial batches.
The process is looking a bit like this:
If you received a Communities survey email to your registered Tumblr email address, fill it out! If youâre interested in helping us in this beta test period, thatâs your way of potentially getting early access. If you did not receive an email with the Communities survey, donât fret! Communities will be rolling out to more people as we expand our testing.Â
Weâll go through the results and choose a diverse range of community ideas to gather a wide array of feedback.
Selected testers will receive a second survey with more detailed questions about their proposed community. Very practical stuff, like the name, title, and description, whether it should be public or private, the About page contents, its own community guidelines, and more.
We will create the new Tumblr community on your behalf using the information supplied. Weâre building the tools that will let people create and edit communities themselves, so eventually youâll be able to change them without needing our help. But for now, weâre creating and editing them for you, as needed.
After weâve created the community, youâll be made its first admin. Everything from here on out is up to you â Tumblr staff wonât be in your community (unless you invite us, of course). Youâll be able to invite anyone on Tumblr to your community. However, your community will have a population cap to start, limiting how many people can be in it and invited, as a way of keeping this beta test somewhat contained and manageable for us. Weâll be able to raise that population cap for communities that are growing and if we want to test further in that direction.
And throughout, weâll be asking for feedback, both in some special communities for everyone in the closed beta, and via more surveys and the Support tickets we receive.
This closed beta version of Communities is far from finished, and thatâs part of the reason we want to start opening it up to more of you for feedback. There are a lot of rough edges and known issues, but we think itâs far enough along that itâs usable enough for testing. We need feedback in order to feel like weâre building the right thing.
The very first public community is called âCommunities Feedbackâ for this reason! We want everyone helping us test out communities to tell us about it, so people in this closed beta will be in there by default. We want to use that space to be more public and real-time about new pieces weâre building, bugs weâre fixing, things we know are broken, and answers to common questions. There is an additional, private community for community admins, to help shape how administrating and moderating these spaces will work. And if you donât want to use those spaces, you can always use the âFeedbackâ category in our Support form.
Stay tuned for more, and keep an eye on that Communities Feedback space if youâd like to see how things are changing over time.