How I got my Tumblr shadowban fixed in under 24 hours!
1A few weeks ago, I found that my Tumblr blog, which I've posted to steadily for 14 years, suddenly couldn't message other Tumblr users--couldn't even reply to replies on my own posts--and couldn't see its own posts in search results, even through its own search form.
0:00 - what is a shadowban & does Tumblr do it
2:00 - what I tried at first
5:26 - someone said "Social features" support category worked
7:50 - it worked!
8:22 - what Tumblr Trust & Safety said
9:51 - wrap!
Tumblr says that they don't "shadowban" users -- https://help.tumblr.com/knowledge-base/appearing-in-search-results/ -- but this sure seemed like a shadowban. And I found a lot of other people saying their Tumblr blog was having the same problems--some for up to 6 months with no reply from Tumblr support.
I had filed two separate tickets--one a few days later--about problems I was encountering, and received no human response from Tumblr support after nearly a week. The semi-official Tumblr support presence on Reddit seems to have gone dead 4-5 months ago, and Tumblr support on Twitter just seems to tell people it can't help them, and refers them back to the standard Tumblr support form:
https://www.tumblr.com/support
Finally though, I came across a post by another Tumblr user, on Tumblr, who said they'd finally got their shadowban fixed by filing a new ticket and this time picking the "Social features" support category. (I wanted to share this post but that user wiped that whole blog of theirs--they have others--two days later!)
So I tried that: filled out a new Tumblr support ticket, choosing "Social features" as the category.
21 hours later, I got a reply: Tumblr Trust & Safety had fixed my problem and apologized for the inconvenience; my blog had been "flagged by our anti-spam control," they said.
Never got a human supply from those two other tickets I'd filed under other support categories. In 14 years on Tumblr, this was the first time it had taken more than a day for Tumblr support to help me.
There seem to be a lot of Tumblr users having this problem, and their Twitter support says there's a backlog support is having to work through to get to new support tickets. Seems like a bad situation. I hope filing a "Social features" report can help some of the other shadowbanned people.
My Tumblr post about this, with some more details, is
https://smbhax.tumblr.com/post/775505867375263744
2/21/25
#tumblr #shadowban #shadowbanned #howto #blog #blogs #blogging