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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
ErosBlog posts containing ""pornocalypse comes for us all""
October 17th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Ever since Dr. Faustus asked me about it on Twitter, I’ve been paying attention to the stories about a scummy British tabloid fright piece on dirty ebooks that has been rippling through the online bookselling ecosystem recently. It’s terribly difficult to get precise information, but it appears that all the major ebook retailers are going through their catalogs with fire and sword and badly-tuned keyword searches, removing many titles from availability and explaining themselves either badly or not-at-all.
The best summary (even if it’s a few days old now) that I’ve seen so far is here: Self-Published Erotica is Being Singled Out For Sweeping Deletions From Major eBookstores.
I haven’t done any independent reporting of my own, except to go check my own self-published ebook (a lightly-edited repackage and modernization of a neglected Victorian classic) in the Amazon and Kobo stores. I can report that it remains in both stores, though I did get a creepily-vague form email from Kobo putting me on notice of unspecified changes in how they enforce their unspecified policies.
I guess I don’t need to remind everybody that eventually the pornocalypse comes for us all…
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August 8th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Reports are coming in that Tumblr has begun (or ramped up) a crackdown on people who use Tumblr for adult marketing in ways that seem consistent with Tumblr’s community guidelines. Remember, those guidelines say:
Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing. Spam doesn’t belong on Tumblr.
Now comes word (and I’ve confirmed it) that there’s at least one adult link that you simply are not allowed to type on Tumblr. (Actually, you can type it, but then your save/publish button won’t work…) A link to this appeared in my Twitter feed:
Post Yahoo acquisition we’ve had several Extra Lunch Money (ELM) related Tumblr blogs removed (with no explanation given) and we’ve heard from other websites and sellers who’ve had their Tumblr blogs taken down as well. While Tumblr has always removed blogs (which they are completely within the right to do), we’ve noticed something more troubling. Tumblr is censoring links to certain adult websites from being published. Which adult website? Namely, extralunchmoney(.)com.
Wait. What’s ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
ELM is a marketplace for amateur models to sell their own hand made adult movies, pictures, and more. It’s like Etsy, but a LOT naughtier.
How are they censoring ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
If you try put in any link with “extralunchmoney(.)com” Tumblr will not allow you to save the post so you can publish it. Instead it will say “There was a problem saving your post” which is Tumblr speak for you’re not allowed to link to this website.
Even worse, you can’t even type out the word “extralunchmoney(.)com” in a post without using parentheses. You’ll get the same “There was a problem saving your post” message.
Go ahead and try for yourself.
So I did. I created a brand new Tumblr blog and, as the very first post, I tried to save this:
Wow. So then I changed the “n” to an “r”. Extralurchmoney.com (the place to buy and sell your zombie-themed goods?) saves just fine on Tumblr.
Back to the report:
It’s also not limited to posts. If you want to update your blog side bar to say for example “I help run this site called extralunchmoney(.)com” you’ll get this “error” (lie): “Your settings may not be valid…”
If you take out the reference to the link then magically everything works ok again. Rather than specifically saying “Sorry, you can’t post links to that site”, they present the problem as a vague technical issue…when in fact it’s CLEARLY an issue with the domain name. But, from the looks of it, Tumblr wants to hide that fact.
Why are they blocking ExtraLunchMoney(.)com?
We’re not 100% sure, but it’s probably due to the adult nature of ELM (Tumblr if you’re reading this and we’re wrong, please let us know). The end result being thousands of ELM sellers and supporters being restricted from freely posting what they want to their Tumblr blogs. Which somehow seems like the opposite of valuing “creative expression.”
ELM does not have an affiliate program, and nothing in Tumblr’s community guidelines prohibits self-promotion or adult promotion as long as it’s neither deceptive, nor spam. Of course Tumblr does not define what it means by those terms, but nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that a sneaky and dishonest blanket ban on publishing a specific adult URL is consistent with Tumblr’s methods. Beginning during the negotiation of the sale to Yahoo, Tumblr’s practice has been to disadvantage its adult content in silent and hard-to-notice ways, even when that content was fully-consistent with its fairly permissive community guidelines. What’s more, when forced to backtrack by public outrage after the big robots.txt debacle, Tumblr went to great lengths to pretend it was all a misunderstood and unfortunate technical error.
So my prediction here is that if the link-censoring initiative attracts enough negative attention, publishing these links will start working again and Tumblr will either say nothing, or explain that it was all just a glitch. But if this story doesn’t reach critical mass, look for the list of disfavored adult links to continue to grow.
I am also hearing reports that Tumblr is more aggressively deleting blogs that are being used for adult promotion, even when that promotion seems consistent with the community guidelines. In addition to the mention in the blockquote above of “we’ve had several Extra Lunch Money (ELM) related Tumblr blogs removed”, there are similar reports from the world of camgirls:
As of this morning, my tumblr – hellenlefay.tumblr.com – no longer exists. One minute it was there, the next it wasn’t. I tried opening the dashboard and it said my blog had been terminated, and I could contact support if I didn’t know why this happened.
Um, of course I had no idea why this happened! If you’ve ever stumbled onto my tumblr, it’s very obvious I’ve put quite a bit of time into the design and content. I wouldn’t intentionally do anything that would get me removed! In the recent past I updated my blog to be listed as NSFW, even though I only post pg13 pictures, just in case I was reported for being considered adult content but not listed as such.
So, why was I terminated? Not warned, not suspended, but my entire account deleted?
Spam and affiliate marketing.
This is the reply I received from Mathieu inTumblr Support:
We’ve terminated your Tumblr account at hellenlefay.tumblr.com for spam or affiliate marketing. Per the policies you agreed to when creating your account, Tumblr prohibits such activity.
Don’t put deceptive links or dubious code in your posts. That includes using Javascript to inject unwanted ads in blogs, or embedding links to interstitial or pop-up ad services. Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing.
Let’s break that down to address each point. First off, I typically post 1-5 posts per day, so that’s hardly spam. It can’t even be argued that I’m spamming other people through their Ask or Fanmail boxes, because I rarely use them. Or mine. As for affiliate marketing, that is not something I’ve ever gotten into. I truly admire the girls who put the effort into running a successful affiliate system, but really really really I can’t, so no affiliate marketing on my Tumblr.
Deceptive links or dubious code – anything I’ve ever posted has been extremely obvious about where the link goes. For example, if it says “Clips4Sale”, guess what? It links to c4s.com/53691, which is my Clips4Sale page. Shocker! The only sort-of-sneaky code I had done was when I put in endless scrolling and disabled right-clicking on my photos. ;) The last point, about using deceptive means to generate traffic, really threw me… I guess showing my butt is a deceptive way to increase traffic?
The main purpose of my tumblr was promotion – I posted photos of myself and links to my websites. My posts were PG13. I was tagged as NSFW as a precaution, because hey, I have some hot friends who post some very hot photos, and I like to reblog them once in a while. I linked to my profiles on other sites, both on my tumblr blog and in my posts.
My entire account was terminated without warning or suspension.
This isn’t just happening to me, it’s also happened to a couple of my camgirl friends. They were terminated without warning as well.
If you’re a camgirl (or really any adult industry person), be aware that tumblr can and will remove your entire account if they don’t like what you post or where your links go.
This, too, is not new. Tumblr has a long and unsavory history of deleting adult blogs (and for all I know, non-adult ones) it deems too commercial, even if they don’t violate the community guidelines. The best explanation I’ve got for that is that they’ve got an extremely broad and flexible definition of spam. Which, if they’d be explicit about it instead of sheepish and deceptive and piously “we value your freedom of expression”, would be no problem at all.
But they’re not. They are quietly and dishonestly hostile to adult content in general and to adult marketing and self-promotion in particular, even when that marketing complies with their community guidelines in every particular. Which is a nice intro to this morning’s sermon on The Catechism of Bacchus:
- Tumblr is, at the end of the day, a blogging service.
- As I’ve been saying since at least 2004, blogging services suck.
- This is Bacchus’s First Rule and it remains the rule: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.
- You will be tempted to ignore The Rule because of social media network effects.
- You may even feel forced to ignore it, because you can’t get enough attention on your own platform.
- When you disregard the rule (and everybody does, even me who wrote it) you will get burned.
- Count on it. Plan for it. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
Update, some hours later: The “extralunchmoney.com” string can now be published on Tumblr without a problem, or it could when I just tested it. I do not believe it was a glitch but if Tumblr ever acknowledges this trial balloon, I’ll betcha they claim it was.
Updated update: It’s official, Tumblr support said it was a glitch. As I predicted. “Looks like a glitch on our end was causing the problem, but now it’s fixed.” Pretty strange “glitch”, though. My guess is that they’ve got a shit-list of unpublishable URLs, which are supposed to be genuine bad actors. This would make sense, to stop a malware link that’s going viral for instance. The “glitch” here would be that a legitimate URL got put on the list, I’m guessing. If they are ramping up enforcement of affiliate spam and somebody got overzealous or had poor training, it would explain this outcome. That would also explain why the camgirl sites are getting slammed; those links they use to direct people to their camming sites look a lot like affiliate links in structure, even though they aren’t actually affiliate links in function.
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June 26th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
My twitter feed just lit up with outrage about the email Google just sent to some or all of the adult bloggers on Blogger/BlogSpot blogs (of which there are a lot):
Important Update to Adult Content Policy on Blogger
You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.
Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.
If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Great thanks to Molly for sending me a copy; I myself do not have any Blogger-hosted sites because of Bacchus’s First Rule. However, Blogger/BlogSpot have a long history as the most reliable and long-lived host for free blogging, and (other than a heavy hand with an adult warning page that went up a few years ago) they’ve always been entirely adult-friendly. I didn’t see this coming, not in any specific way.
Obviously currently active bloggers can (if they move quickly — four day’s warning, seriously Google?) delete offending affiliate links and save their blogs. But the real impact here will be in to the long list of moribund adult blogs going back for most of a decade. There are many thousands of these, and being moribund, there’s no hope that they’ll be saved. Not only will they vanish from the web (I wonder if Google will use robots.txt to kill them in the WayBack Machine like Tumblr does?) but when they go, they’ll take with them an “installed base” of ancient blogroll links the departure of which will be strongly felt by all of the adult sites they ever linked to. It’s going to be a Page Rank bloodbath, for the folks who care about SEO and all that.
The pornocalypse comes for us all, I tell ya.
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June 10th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a person who had their personal D/s blog deleted from WordPress.com (the blog hosting service, not the .org self-hosted blogging software) and has been utterly unable to get any explanation except for form letter responses about the terms of service. From WordPress.com hostile to kink?, this excerpt:
I would respect them if they said “we don’t want mature content, period”. But I refuse to support a company that wants to be perceived as mature-friendly, but secretly kicks out kinky bloggers for subjective, undocumented and arbitrary reasons. That’s just dishonest.
The pornocalypse comes for us all. And anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.
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June 4th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
It was February 22, really, when the stories about Google Glass finally began to catch my attention. This is the one that first fired my imagination:
Verge: I used Google Glass: Up close and personal with Google’s visionary new computer
That was the story that convinced me that Glass (or some future, similar device) was something I’d actually maybe want to use. I believe it was this paragraph that actually did the trick:
If you get a text message or have an incoming call when you’re walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up – nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people.
Of course, it was only six days later on February 28 that I began to see the hideous tentacles behind the curtain:
Creative Good: The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
I was (and remain) confident that all the person-to-person privacy issues (“Are you filming me now? Please take off the glasses”) will sort themselves out through normal cultural adjustment, but I hadn’t really considered the full implications of making every Glass-wearer into an uncompensated Google StreetView camera-monkey:
Take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.
Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.
…
The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.
Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.
Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device — every single day, everywhere they go — on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
Well, that’s gonna suck. But if wearable computing is a compelling user experience, people will suck it up and monkey-cam their way to happiness. Let’s move on to the porn stuff, shall we?
Fast forward to April 17, which was the day a bizarre trainwreck of competing Glass stories landed. Let me just dump these two headlines here for you in the order that I saw them:
Wired: Google Is Forbidding Users From Reselling, Loaning Glass Eyewear
BizJournals: How Google Glass will change porn forever
Do you see the dialectical struggle between those two headlines?
Up until the moment I saw the first headline, I had assumed that Glass would be just another Android device, running some sort of special Android software to be sure, but basically part of the open Android ecosystem that allows users to run whatever software they want on their hardware. More fool me:
The company’s terms of service on the limited-edition wearable computer specifically states, “you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google’s authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty.”
If they’ve got the power to remotely deactivate your computer, that means you don’t own it; and it also means that in order to preserve that power, they’ve got to control the software you run on it. Which means Google Glass will be like the iPhone — a walled garden ecosystem, not an open one.
And porn is never welcome for long in corporate walled gardens. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. The instant I saw those terms of service, I knew that Glass would never be a porn-friendly device. Knew it. Dismissed it from my adult interest. Never gonna happen. Game over, man.
Nor was that any kind of surprise. Google has grown increasingly porn-hostile in recent years. Remember when they removed the “off” setting from the SafeSearch filter button, and turned it into a toggle between “on” and the former “moderate” setting? Have you noticed how harshly porn sites are penalized in the search algorithms lately? Remember when they started filtering Violet Blue out of the autocomplete search dropdowns? Or decided that there’s no such thing as a “safe search” for “clitoris” while allowing three million “safe” results for “penis”? The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
So if porn on Google Glass was always a non-starter, what was up with that other “Glass will change porn forever” headline that dropped on the same day? Well, it turns out that the Silicon Valley Business Journal interviewed Kink.com’s Peter Acworth and got some great quotes, which (because he makes porn for a living) are (when you look at them closely) all about how Google Glass might change the making of porn, rather than its consumption or distribution:
“Google Glass opens up new opportunities for reality-based films,” says Acworth.
Acworth says Glass offers amateur filmmakers the opportunity to produce homegrown films featuring couples at home or other spontaneous situations.
“You could film picking up someone at a bar and taking them home, for example,” he said. “It takes the whole genre of POV and reality productions one stage further. You’ll hopefully get something very authentic.”
And that’s nifty (once you gulp yourself past those “sorting out the interpersonal privacy stuff” issues I hand-waved us past near the beginning of this post), but it doesn’t require Glass to be porn-friendly. Acworth is talking about Glass as a new sort of camera device, and that’s it.
So, that was April. In early May, I wrote this post:
ErosBlog: Google Glass: No Fuck For You!
It was actually a bit of a cheap shot on my part, reflecting my increasing awareness (and perhaps even a bit of nascent bitterness) that Google Glass wasn’t going to be an open platform that adults could play with. The actual story was that the voice-recogniton-to-email engine built into Glass was censoring cuss words, replacing them with asterisks. And as I noted at the time, this “felt” more like an accidental default setting inherited from some earlier, more business-corporate use of the voice recognition engine. But it prompted me to write this:
What’s it going to be like, living in a world where everything you say passes through filters you can’t see and don’t control? Where, when you search for something you can’t find, you don’t know if it doesn’t exist or if it was silently filtered from your search results? When someone says something to you, did they actually say that? Or were their words edited on the fly?
Obviously this is relevant to the Pornocalypse discussion. If the corporate data silos that own the filters are porn-hostile, the world will look very different than it would if the filters were transparent and under user control.
That was early May. Then in late May came a spate of stories about genuine porn apps (well, really only one) coming soon for Google Glass:
Huffington Post: Google Glass Porn App To Be Released In A ‘Couple Of Days’ By MiKandi Porn App Store
New York Post: XXX-ray vision: Google Glass getting porn apps
Time: Yes, Of Course There Will Be Google Glass Porn
The only story I actually bothered to read at the time was the one by Violet Blue, because I knew deep in my gut that there would never be porn apps on Google Glass:
ZDNet: MiKandi making Google Glass porn, app imminent
Violet expressed a little bit of the necessary skepticism:
However excited as I am to see what Mikandi does with Glass, I think I’m not the only one wondering if Google is going to pull an Apple and send MiKiandi a cease-and-desist — or worse.
Indeed. And that brings our pornocalypse timeline up to yesterday, June 3rd, when the “porn app for Glass” finally released:
TechNewsDaily: MiKandi Launches First Google Glass Porn App
Mashable: Google Glass Gets Its First Porn App
NBC: Porn app comes to Google Glass – are you surprised?
Buried in the TechNewsDaily story was the key kernel of cold-water truth that would inform the next wave of headlines:
MiKandi has been keeping close tabs on Google Glass’ terms of service, and discovered that over the weekend that they now prohibit sexually explicit apps. “We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified,” said McEwen. “We wanted to be sure we played within Google’s boundaries and push the envelope in a responsible way.”
That’s the anticipatory drumroll before the headsman’s axe falls, people. But — late yesterday while the drum tattoo was still beating — I saw a different story that reinforced the extent to which Glass is going to be a walled garden:
Slate: “Don’t Be Creepy”: Google Glass Won’t Allow Face Recognition
People (and not just cops!) are really going to want facial recognition in their wearable field-of-vision computers. Those of us with a touch of face-blindness, in particular, would really welcome an app that put names over heads just like in World Of Warcraft. But, no, here’s Google’s Saturday update to the developer policies:
Don’t use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time.
Walled garden, folks. Your hardware is not actually yours. It will not run the software that you want it to run. It will only run the software Google wants it to run.
Meanwhile, back here in porn world, the drumbeat about the Glass porn app came to its abrupt crescendo later in the day yesterday. The axe fell. Let’s go right to the horse’s mouth for this one, to the Mikandi blog:
Mikandi: Google Bans Glass Porn Apps
This is worth quoting in some detail:
Wow, what a morning, folks. Really. We appreciate all the positive feedback on our adult Glass app, Tits & Glass.
Since we announced the availability of Tits & Glass this morning, nearly 10,000 unique vistors have visited TitsAndGlass.com, and a dozen Glass users have already signed up with our app. Not surprisingly, we’ve reached our API limits. Our previously approved request to up our limit was later denied today, so unfortunately, there’ll be no more updates to Tits & Glass until tomorrow.
However, more importantly, and thus the purpose behind this blog post- MiKandi became aware today that Google changed its policy over the weekend to ban adult content on all Glassware.
When we received our Glass and started developing our app 2 weeks ago, we went through the policy very carefully to make sure we were developing the app within the terms. We double checked again last week when making the site live on the Internet and available for install for testing during last week’s announcement. We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified by Google. We also double checked our emails to see if any notifications of policy changes were announced, but we haven’t found any such emails.
Although the app is still live and people are using it, at this point we must make changes to the app in order to comply with the new policies.
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. I could have told ’em, if they’d asked me.
Of course this has triggered a storm of breathless headlines that I found waiting in my morning feeds:
Fox News: Mikandi Porn app for Google Glass released, immediately banned
ABC: Google Strips First Glass Porn App, Bans Adult Content on Its Connected Glasses
Daily Mail: Google Glass porn app launched – and then swiftly banned
Silicon Republic: Google quickly updates policy to shut down porn apps for Glass
There’s about 600 more of these — it appears to be the tech story of yesterday and today — but they all say the same thing. Here’s Google’s corporate-bland response, to the Fox News reporter:
“Our policies make it clear that Glass does not allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sexual acts, or sexually explicit material. Any Glassware that violates this policy will be blocked from appearing on Glass.
Our Explorer Program makes users active participants in evolving Glass ahead of a wider consumer launch. In keeping with this approach, we’ve updated our developer policies. We look forward to learning more from our users as we update the software and evolve our policies in the weeks and months ahead.”
And there you have it, folks, straight from the belly of the data-silo. You might spend 1,500 smackeroos to buy your Google Glasses, but Google says you can’t run any software on there that might specifically facilitate your ability to see bare titties. It’s the iPhone all over again. Nifty for what it does? Sure enough. But the device does not work for you. It doesn’t truly belong to you. You’ll never truly own it. It’s just a hardware portal for that limited subset of activities the manufacturer considers to be consistent with its own corporate image.
I’ve said it before and I’ve got the weary certainty that I’ll be saying it many times again:
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
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May 20th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
As promised in my last post, this is the post in which I tell you how to make a full and complete backup of your porn Tumblr blog (or, really, any Tumblr). My goal for you is a set of files on your own hard drive that contains all the text and all the links and all the pictures (even the full-sized high-res click through ones) that you’ve got on your current Tumblr blog, all linked together in a way that you can open the site in your browser and browse through it just like you would online. This can be done. It’s not even very hard. And once you’ve got it done, you’ll have all the raw material you would need re-create your tumblr blog on some other hosting, if anything should happen to Tumblr or to your porn blog on Tumblr.
But why should you worry about that? Why might you need a Tumblr backup?
Well, as I write this, the news is official: Yahoo has purchased Tumblr for more than a billion dollars, cash. (Tumblr shareholders did not want any stinky Yahoo stock, which should tell you something.) The business press has been pointing out for awhile that Yahoo will need to deal with what the suits in the corporate/financial/advertising world consider to be Tumblr’s “porn problem“. And Yahoo itself has a terrible reputation for buying cool, trendy, successful websites, running them into the ground or neglecting them to death, and then shuttering them. (Remember Geocities? Shaddup, it was cool once. A long time ago…) As Violet Blue puts it in her Sex Tech column at ZDNet:
Yahoo! is well-known for misunderstanding the user base of properties it acquires and ruining – then scrapping – once-active and beloved properties.
…
But if Flickr’s rep [under Yahoo’s ownership] with poorly policing ‘art nudes’ is any hint of Tumblr’s fate, then we’re likely to see lots of once-happy users forced into confusing self-rating protocols, having their accounts banned and years of content deleted with no recourse, and a new content policy practically written by trolls who want the easiest path to shut down people they don’t like.
I, myself, have been speculating for a couple of weeks that Tumblr would soon start cracking down on its “porn problem”, starting with an idle prediction in my The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All post and expanding on it when I discovered (apparently before pretty much anybody else noticed) that Tumblr had started trying to hide all the porn blogs from Google. At first the specific reason was not clear, but in the last few days the drumbeat of anticipatory news about the Yahoo purchase began to make the pieces fall into place. It’s safe to speculate that Tumblr began trying to minimize its “porn problem” while the sale was being negotiated, and there’s a strong basis for concern that (swiftly or eventually) Yahoo will continue that process and attempt to rid the Tumblr ecosystem of porn blogs. Even if they don’t, their track record of failure with acquisitions is such that there’s a good chance that all of Tumblr will have failed or shut down within a few years. And, for people who aren’t following Bacchus’s First Law of The Internet, backups are really important.
Enough nattering. You want tools and instructions.
I’m going to show you two ways to do this, a best-but-somewhat-complex way and an easy-but-somewhat-incomplete way.
Complete Tumblr Backup Solution:
First, the good way, the one recommended by my friend and prolific Tumblr-user Dr. Faustus. I’ve tested this and it works. When you’re done, you’ll have a complete copy of your Tumblr site on your own hard drive that you could navigate with your internet unplugged.
The program you want is: HTTrack/WinHTTrack Website Copier. It’s an open-source free-software general utility for copying and mirroring websites, available for most current versions of Windows as well as for a wide variety of Linux/Unix flavors. The Windows version presents a fairly old-fashioned interface with a bunch of cryptic options, but most of them come pre-set with sensible defaults that you actually don’t need to mess with. Plus, there’s good documentation. (Note well: there are many other programs out there that can accomplish this job. I’m recommending this one because it works and because I’m aware of it; I’m not claiming it’s the best or the easiest.)
Download the software and install it, then run it. You’ll be presented with a welcome screen where you need to click “Next”. Then, this screen:
The arrows show you the two fields that need your attention. All you really need to do is give this backup project a name and tell the software where to save the backup. Then hit “Next”:
On this screen you need to type in the URL for the Tumblr you want to back up. It will be something like: http://yourtumblr.tumblr.com — and there’s one vital reason you need to press the “Set options” button. When you do, you’ll see this:
I’ve pointed arrows at three optional settings tabs that you may want to adjust, and at the one mandatory options tab where you must change a setting. I’m going to ignore the optional ones for now, except to say that you would tinker with these if you wanted to change the sorts of media files you’re saving beyond the basic .gif, .jpg, and .png (you’d need to do this if you were saving a Tumblr that had .wav files or .zip files or .mp3s), or if you need to limit this program from slamming your internet connection too hard. It’s the mandatory “Spider” tab you really need to click:
See the box where it says “follow robots.txt rules”? That robots.txt they’re talking about is the very same unwelcome bugger that got us into this mess in the first place. As a general proposition, one should usually instruct one’s electronic robot spider minions to follow robots.txt rules; unruly robot spiders are a menace to the internet and to web servers everywhere. But this principle of polite internet behavior assumes that you haven’t had your own data locked behind the hostile barbed wire of some corporate data-silo forced-labor camp where the robots.txt has been put in place to hide your porny visage so that the corporate camp commissars will look prettier in the pages of Forbes Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. When it’s your data, you’re perfectly within your moral rights to ignore the robots.txt in order to extricate it; and so that’s what we’re going to do here. Change it using the drop-down menu to say “no robots.txt rules”.
Yay! We’re almost done. Hit the “OK” button, hit “Next”, hit “Finish”, and your site copying should begin.
How long it will take to finish depends on the available bandwidth of your net connection, the memory and processing speed of your computer, and on whether you tweaked any of the options that control things like how many simultaneous connections your computer is making and how many files it’s trying to download in parallel. It also depends on how many pages there are on the Tumblr blog you are backing up, and on how big the images are. The default settings seem to be fairly gentle about not maxing out your internet connection or putting an unruly amount of strain on the server at the site you are trying to copy. Using default settings and a fairly crappy internet connection, I downloaded a test adult Tumblr blog (with permission of the blogger) in about two hours, that had roughly a thousand posts and took up about three-quarters of a gigabyte of room on my hard drive. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.
What does success look like? You’ll have a folder on your hard drive with the name you provided on the first options screen. If you open it, you will find many sub-folders, and much that may seem mysterious. You should also find a file called “index.html” — and if you click on it, it should open in a new browser window where you’ll be looking at your backed up Tumblr site, using nothing but the files on your hard drive.
What have we not accomplished? Well, you’ve made what should be a full and true copy, but it’s not a nice clean export in some standard format that you could use to easily import all your posts into another content management system or blogging tool. HTML files and related images are scattered through a system of directories and subdirectories that, while logical, may not be the simplest thing to work with. Using the data you’ve got, a clever computer person could generate an XHTML document (or something similar) that could be semi-automatically imported into (say) WordPress. But it would take parsing; it would take work. Figuring out how to take the copy you just made and turn it back into a non-Tumblr website is a solvable problem, but how easy or hard it might be to actually do it depends on your access to computer expertise and tools. For now, you’re safe in the knowledge that you’ve got all the posts you’ve made this past however-many years. You’ve got the images, you’ve got their metadata (any tags you set for them and any credits you may have reblogged or included) and you’ve got the clever things you said about them, all, safe on your hard drive.
Now would be a good time to back up your hard drive. I’m just sayin’.
Partial/Easier Tumblr Backup Solution:
Perhaps all the above is too involved or too complex for you. Or maybe you tried, and failed. For you, there’s a simple little web tool called Backup Jammy where you just type your desired URL into the box and press “Go”. That’s it. A single huge web page appears on your screen with all your Tumblr post content in a simplified format. Then you can use your browser’s “Save as web page” function to save it to your hard disk.
I don’t really recommend this tool. It doesn’t save nearly as much data as HTTrack/WinHTTrack does. In particular, all you seem to get is the standardized Tumblr 500-pixel versions of your images, and none of the higher-res versions that you may have posted. And if you have more posts than will fit in the memory of your computer at one time, you will have to do this in chunks, and save the chunks with appropriate names so you don’t overwrite one with another. It’s a less-complete solution. However, it’s also much easier, especially if your Tumblr blog only has a couple of hundred posts. And it might be enough for you. Certainly it’s better than nothing.
Conclusion
Given the existential threat that the adult Tumblr ecosystem is facing, I hope that smarter people than me will soon take some of the many fine website copying/mirroring tools that are out there, and meld them with friendly idiot-resistant interfaces and powerful parsing tools in a way that provides a seamless Tumblr export in a standardized format that’s ready for import into other blogging tools and posting on other social media platforms. I very much hope so, anyway. But that won’t happen today. A crufty backup you make today is worth a thousand times more than a perfect backup you never make before the platform goes down or is nerfed into uselessness or puts up filters to prevent the users from spidering their own content.
I’m painfully aware that the adult Tumblr backup solutions I’m offering here are messy, imperfect, and incomplete. All I can say in my defense is that they are the very best that I could find and test and describe and put up on the web in a single working day. For many of you, the Tumblr backup options listed here won’t be satisfactory or sufficient, and I apologize in advance for that. But if even a few of the great porn Tumblrs that went dark to public searching in the last few weeks are saved now and preserved on a hard drive and someday returned to the public web because of today’s effort, I’ll count it a day very well spent.
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May 19th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
The full implications of Tumblr making adult-flagged porn Tumblr blogs non-searchable, and hiding their content from the search engines, are only just starting to sink in for people.
For instance: if you have an adult tumblr, now you can’t even search your own blog to find an old post.
I’m getting panicky emails from people with huge adult Tumblrs, thousands of posts. Apparently internal Tumblr search has never worked well (you can search for one tag, or for blog names, but not for post content and there are no multi-keyword searches) and it’s impractical to scroll back very far in your own Tumblr dashboard. So they were in the habit of typing [keyword] [their own tmblr url] into Google, and hey presto! There would be the post they were looking for.
Now their blogs have a non-consensual robots.txt file that excludes Google, and all of those search results are gone from Google.
Worse yet? Tumblr blogs flagged “adult” aren’t searchable even with Tumblr’s own internal search. You can test this yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, go to your settings, and make sure you haven’t checked the “Browse tag pages in Safe Mode (Hide content from NSFW blogs)” setting:
Unlike the one that doesn’t actually “allow search engines to index your blog”, this checkbox appears to actually work in the narrow sense that if it is not checked, you can search for blogs flagged “NSWF” within the Tumblr tag search interface. But this checkbox lies by omission. You’ve got the option to search tag pages of NSFW blogs (or not) but opting to search them does not let you search blogs that have the deeper-level-of-perdition “adult” flag.
My test for this is to search for a recent post at Wicked Knickers, which I used as my “adult” flagged example in the Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post:
The post we will be looking for in the Tumblr dashboard tag search has a time stamp of 9:30pm yesterday, May 18, and is tagged “ziegfeld” which makes it a nice handy and recent thing to search for.
We already know that Google no longer has access to the posts on an adult-flagged Tumblr like this:
So, what happens in the Tumblr tag search interface? If you’re logged in, this is what you see when you search for tumblr posts with the “ziegfeld” tag. The posts returned are listed in date order (most recent first) and dates are visible as tooltips on the live page, so I’ve added them in the margin with red arrows and white text. You’ll see that the Wicked Knickers post is not returned by the Tumblr search:
Interestingly, that logged-in Tumblr dashboard search result is displayed at a URL ( http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ziegfeld ) that returns something very different (but still no sign of our Wicked Knickers post) if you navigate to it as a not-logged-in person:
Try it yourself if you’ve got an adult-flagged Tumblr blog. Log in and try to search for your own posts in the search box on your own dashboard. You will, sadly, fail.
So, what is to be done? How can you search your own Tumblr blog?
The answer is, quite simply, you cannot — not while it’s on Tumblr’s server behind their robots.txt that you do not have the power to alter or remove.
But, all is not lost. Be ye not in despair. If you could only back up your adult Tumblr blog — make a complete copy of it, on your local hard drive — you could search it there with any file searching tool. Or, if you have a web server of your own, you could upload that copy (mirror it) onto your own web space, where it would once again be indexed and searched by Google.
That’s all I got. It’s the only way. It’s also a very good idea, because eventually The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All, and because Anything Worth Doing On The Internet Is Worth Doing At Your Own Domain That You Control.
Your next logical question is “But how do I do that? How do I back up a Tumblr blog?”
It’s not a simple question. The answer isn’t simple either. But, it can be done. So, that’s my next post.
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