For those unaware because staff isn’t saying it
Tumblr was deemed too full of inappropriate content to be allowed to be downloaded from the app store.
It has this “inappropriate” problem because of rampant porn ad bot accounts. The old solutions were bots to detect image sets with nsfw content, the automatically enabled safe mode, tag filtering for mobile, and wide takedowns of nsfw bots based on words used (that’s why their messages are full of numbers and symbols, to evade this)
Tumblr released their own bot supposedly capable of wiping the ad bots, but it’s taking down many popular blogs, possibly due to sheer amounts of posting or sheer amounts of ad bots in their notes. This bot was likely rushed to be put out.
You are more likely to be accidentally flagged if you post external links, as well. If your acct is taken down you CAN get it back, but it’s a pain. E-mail tumblr support for help with this. It takes down side blogs with the main ones.
I’ll be halting art posts for about a week or until this problem is fixed.
EDIT (11/19) : Tumblr released a statement a few hours after I put this out explaining that the nature of their audit was for manually submitted child pornography that was likely original in nature, as their filter checking against known existing CP was failing to catch what was being uploaded. My bad. I assumed the main issue was the porn bots since they’ve become exceedingly resilient lately and are cropping up faster than ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is another issue that they’re tackling during this time, but the blame is less so on them.
I’ve also been told that the actual account “purges” were an errant glitch that happened to be running around the same time, but it is coinciding around the same time as the links issue and the rapid disappearance of bots during the audit, so I’m really not sure on that piece. Take care folks
2nd edit (11/22) : since I’m still getting flooded with replies / notes saying “OP it’s about CP” or “no we don’t know why this is happening, wait for staff” : edited that original post a few hours day-of, before we got word from Staff about it. I know. If you don’t know, here’s the Staff statement everyone is referencing :
https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012260613-November-16-2018-Issues-with-the-iOS-app
(supposedly being updated as Staff works on the problem but it’s been a few days)
