in the latest LOONEY TUNES SQUASHED BY A RUBBER ANVIL shit around here, my backup blog, the blog i created after my original tiny video game blog got restricted by the automod, got restricted.
tl;dr please follow @unobtainableitem if you want to follow me, i'm keeping all my stuff there and hoping a support ticket will someday be answered if it has an unknown number of followers between seven (current) and 63+ (podcast blog that is still fine).
The good news is I figured out - mostly - how both of these blogs got restricted even though the podcast blog is not! The bad news is that it happened by way of this blog also being restricted. I shall explain below for the benefit of anyone else dealing with this, but the tl;dr is still that I'm keeping my video game blogging life at @unobtainableitem for now
So after all these months of confidently thinking it couldn't be an IP address issue since my podcast blog kept being Literally Fine...........it turns out it was indeed Tumblr's wellest-known VPN blog restriction. (For anyone who hasn't seen the more popular posts, some VPN IP addresses get autobanned because a lot of people are out there using them for spam and such - most VPNs use a different IP address each time you connect unless you pay for it personalized, so at some point you end up at one a spammer also used - and then Tumblr doesn't have a reliable process to unban real accounts, much less put them on a don't-ban-again list). All of which I vaguely remembered, but this week when I was wailing about not knowing why this kept happening (because the above would have also restricted my podcast blog! and it didn't!) a friend dug up the old popular VPN post and it turns out I was missing something that I could call obvious in hindsight, but is it? is it really??
✨According to the OP, VPN autoban hits when you reblog a post. Even though I've been liking, replying, messaging, and even sending asks on the podcast blog, I haven't reblogged anything there since before the week my video game blog got restricted. If I'd reblogged anything there when I was on whichever IP address had been spam flagged, it probably would've gotten restricted too. ✨
tbf most Actual Bots I've encountered like and reply to posts, so even though it feels like an "obvious" difference it wasn't intuitive that not having reblogged shit lately could be what was protecting it from getting automoderated for being a bot.
Not only does this not happen with all VPN IP addresses, the kicker is that some shared WiFi will end up also getting IP address banned if a spammer has ever used it. You know where this is going. I thought now that I figured out what happened, my looney tunes saga could be fixed by not using a VPN on shared WiFi and just taking on the miniscule risk that my blog would be hacked for boner pills. Unfortunately. The shared WiFi at my temporary apartment building is possibly...also banned?? Maybe??? It's been fine for other websites, but when I tried creating a new Tumblr, Tumblr wouldn't even let me make an account (which I haven't seen before even with a VPN on!) This could be an unrelated issue - according to Reddit sometimes Tumblr account creation goes down? - but at this point I'm giving up and accepting blog restriction until I move and can go to the library more and can maybe get unrestricted on new, hopefully never seen a spammer WiFi. And then get hacked to advertise boner pills, but I'll chance it.