Tumblr CEO David Karp responds to complaints about NSFW censorship.

[Dankasaur]

http://staff.tumblr.com/post/5590655...of-you-who-are

Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW → Adult in your blog settings. This was confusing and unnecessary, so we?ve dropped the extra option. If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check "Flag this blog as NSFW" so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.

Aside from these fixes, there haven?t been any recent changes to Tumblr?s treatment of NSFW content, and our view on the topic hasn?t changed. Empowering your creative expression is the most important thing in the world to us. Making sure people aren?t surprised by content they find offensive is also incredibly important and we are always working to put more control in your hands.

[24/7 Blogging Crew]

thanks for sharing chillvault

[Nasty]

I have a somewhat popular babe blog at tumblr, its a nsfw, has always been a nsfw, they changed it to an adult flag two weeks ago and this is my new search result on google

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt ? learn more.

[Dankasaur]

Originally Posted by Nasty

I have a somewhat popular babe blog at tumblr, its a nsfw, has always been a nsfw, they changed it to an adult flag two weeks ago and this is my new search result on google

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt ? learn more.

In the article Karp explained that it was a bug and it has been fixed today. Keep an eye on it and see what happens.

[signupdamnit]

Originally Posted by Dankasaur

In the article Karp explained that it was a bug and it has been fixed today. Keep an eye on it and see what happens.

I think all the bad publicity over it being censorship made them reconsider. It was definitely not a bug from what I understand regardless of what anyone at Tumblr is saying. They knew what they were doing. For a time any blog which got flagged as "ADULT" (not just NSFW) had an entry in subdomain,tumblr.com/robots.txt which prevented search engines from indexing the blog.

It was shown on this page:

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

And the little chart there clearly showed that ADULT (not just NSFW) blogs would not get indexed by search engines.

But now it looks like they are changing something as this appears at the top of it:

"This Page is out of date and is in the process of being updated."

I guess maybe I'm not quite clear on what they are really going to do and I could be missing something but the above is definitely true. It will be great if they are really going to stop putting all adult blogs (not NSFW) as disallowed in robots.txt.

[dillfly2000]

Over saturation of shitty or "spammy" advertising done by people who don't know how to be discreet, it ruins it for the rest of us.

But I've never used Tumblr so not my world, not my problem (thank all mighty black Jewsus).

[signupdamnit]

I'm wondering what this one was about as well:

1. Last year, we added ?Safe Mode" which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings. As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn?t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.

I noticed things like this and am now wondering if it is all really is fixed as he says. There was definitely some funkiness going on with searching where some nsfw and adult blogs weren't searchable even for people with safe mode off.

[signupdamnit]

Great article on Techcrunch about this. It's not your usual BS article. They lay it all out and also call Tumblr on the bullshit claim that it was a bug. Definitely read it if you have any Tumblr blogs. I can't post the whole thing as it's way too long and the quotes don't do it justice.

What we can tell you is that in subsequent tests (read: more porn searches on Tumblr), it appears that finding adult-themed blog posts with Safe Mode shut off, works (i.e., a tag search). But finding adult-themed blogs (a blog search) is an issue. For the latter, searches for very obvious keywords only return a couple of blog results, though there are plenty of tagged posts returned for that same search.

It?s an odd way to explain the situation, as not only is it unclear what happened, it implies that Tumblr itself is not sure what happened either (?..but for some reason??, the post reads).

Could it be, perhaps, that the ?some reason? was a policy change that Tumblr had hoped would fly under the radar, but did not?

The company concludes its lengthy mea culpa by saying that beyond the fixes listed above (one being the NSFW option dropping the Adult flag, and the second being the bug fix related to searches for Adult and NSFW content on Tumblr not returning results), nothing else has changed recently.

Curious about that claim, we took a look at Tumblr?s ?NSFW? policy page in the Internet Archive?s Way Back Machine, and found that, actually, the page has been consistently updated throughout the year. The fact that Tumblr took the time to rewrite or explain its policies in more detail here seems to contradict the shrug-of-the-shoulders tone of today?s blog post which tries to play off everything that was changed as either bugs or confusing features that needed to be fixed.

Here?s what we found on the Way Back Machine.

Tumblr?s explanations today are confusing at worst, and misleading at best. Tumblr claimed nothing had changed recently, but the company?s NSFW/Adult policies have been in a constant state of flux, and the service is clearly struggling with how it needs to handle the problem of commercial porn spam.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/19/in-...olicy-kind-of/

[Dankasaur]

Originally Posted by signupdamnit

I think all the bad publicity over it being censorship made them reconsider. It was definitely not a bug from what I understand regardless of what anyone at Tumblr is saying. They knew what they were doing. For a time any blog which got flagged as "ADULT" (not just NSFW) had an entry in subdomain,tumblr.com/robots.txt which prevented search engines from indexing the blog.

It was shown on this page:

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

And the little chart there clearly showed that ADULT (not just NSFW) blogs would not get indexed by search engines.

But now it looks like they are changing something as this appears at the top of it:

"This Page is out of date and is in the process of being updated."

I guess maybe I'm not quite clear on what they are really going to do and I could be missing something but the above is definitely true. It will be great if they are really going to stop putting all adult blogs (not NSFW) as disallowed in robots.txt.

Bug or not, clearly they're listening to their users at least. More than pornographers are bitching about their almost ban on porn, it's huge on their site whether they are trying to make a buck from it or are just sharing their favorite porn. Kudos to them for listening instead of ignoring.

[grzepa]

Originally Posted by dillfly2000

Over saturation of shitty or "spammy" advertising done by people who don't know how to be discreet, it ruins it for the rest of us.

Exactly. Automate and shit it all over tumblr with hope someone will buy something. In the longer run it fails.

[deltav]

Originally Posted by Dankasaur

Bug or not, clearly they're listening to their users at least. More than pornographers are bitching about their almost ban on porn, it's huge on their site whether they are trying to make a buck from it or are just sharing their favorite porn. Kudos to them for listening instead of ignoring.

This 100%. Most companies would just wipe it out, prohibit it, and call it good. Tumblr is actually listening to their members and having a dialogue of sorts, trying to find a compromise that everyone can live with. I'm impressed.

Originally Posted by grzepa

Exactly. Automate and shit it all over tumblr with hope someone will buy something. In the longer run it fails.

This IMO has been the story of most adult marketing the past decade-plus, and yeah - in the long run the industry hurts itself as a result.

[CT-Content]

Originally Posted by Nasty

I have a somewhat popular babe blog at tumblr, its a nsfw, has always been a nsfw, they changed it to an adult flag two weeks ago and this is my new search result on google

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt ? learn more.

You get what you pay for !
Was all your efforts worth it ?

[NinjaSteve]

I still don't see a change in robots.txt

[Itchy]

Sitemap: http://********.tumblr.com/sitemap1.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private
Disallow: /random
Disallow: /day
Crawl-delay: 1

is what I see on my robots.txt

[Aidoru]

Tumblr my my my

[signupdamnit]

Originally Posted by Itchy

Sitemap: http://********.tumblr.com/sitemap1.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private
Disallow: /random
Disallow: /day
Crawl-delay: 1

is what I see on my robots.txt

That means you (or more accurately bots) aren't being blocked. Was it different for you a week ago?

[Nasty]

Originally Posted by CT-Content

You get what you pay for !
Was all your efforts worth it ?

99 bucks for a plug-in that cross-posts from hundreds of my blogs to tumblr blogs and hundreds in additional sales with a big traffic boost to some of my blogs, so yea, it was worth it, just hate to see it end

[NinjaSteve]

I see the robots.txt is back to normal, however many pages have been delisted in Google and it's strange that more and more are being removed from the search engine.