Since no one ever reads the terms and agreements (I did because I wanted to see the level of fuckery going on since we all knew THAT was coming from the instant Yahoo bought us), let me break it down for you. It states that they don’t want you using third party themes anymore, and they’re cracking down on NSFW content with no knowledge what so ever how it works in the roleplay community and the concept of tagging and read mores for blogs that AREN’T NSFW to such a degree that they should be flagged as NSFW permanently. Basically, you have to use their themes and be flagged as an NSFW blog if you write any smut what so ever or you risk losing your blog. They’re also going to be monitoring content, apparently? They have some rules about some content oriented things you’re not allowed to post anymore, none of which applied to my blog in particular but might to some of you others.
All I’m saying is that you should make sure that you have other ways of contacting your roleplay partners that you don’t want to lose should this screwing around take a turn for the worst. I get this really bad feeling that it’s about to be time to migrate away, especially if this continues.
To Yahoo,
The roleplay community is vast and a large reason why your site is so popular. Since you’re new, I’d like to offer you a piece of advice; learn how things work around here before you start imposing rules that will drive us away. This is a place to express creativity and by trying to suppress it, you take away the only reason that we’re here. Theme creation, making our blogs look the way we want them to (no disrespect intended but your official themes suck. That’s how third party themes got started in the first place), freedom of expression through creative writing, interacting with like minded individuals. These are the reasons we log in and if you hinder us, we will find somewhere else to go, and you’ll have wasted a lot of money for a website that will go the way of Myspace more quickly than you can imagine. If minor operation changes (the look of the dashboard, the function of the buttons, their placement, etc.) is enough to drive people away, imagine what’s going to happen if you make it difficult for us to do the only thing we come here to do. I don’t know if you realize what a tight knit community we are. If you start plucking us off one by one, others will leave on principle because we don’t just have followers that leave things on our dash for us to reblog, we talk to these people. We’ve formed friendships with these people. We cheer each other up when we’re unhappy, we post suicide alerts for people we think are in danger of self harm and flood them with support, we post memorials for those of us that’ve died, we cheer for each other when good things happen, sympathize when things are bad, admire each other for our abilities, create an environment of acceptance to those newly entering our respective fandoms (if you don’t know what that means, you should learn it because just about every single one of us belongs to at least one fandom), and many of us have known each other for a very, very long time. I’m sure you can see, then, why walking in and trying to take over this culture we built won’t just be a trickling loss of active users but a hemorrhaging.
Also, as far as viruses in third party themes, we never had a problem with viruses until you came along. After YOU purchased Tumblr was the first time I ever got spam mail on this website. I think you should consider that.
