Just received this message about Missing e, the popular browser extension which Tumblr has not taken kindly to. Kinda not comfortable with this, Tumblr. Here’s the full message, for those who haven’t seen it:
Hello! We’ve noticed you’re using a browser hack, Missing-E, that can cause serious problems for you and for Tumblr.
While we love encouraging developers to customize and build off our platform, the unsupported methods being used here create risks to your data, interfere with our ability to develop and scale Tumblr, and create a huge burden for our support team. Specifically:
Data loss: Bugs caused by unsupported hacks often affect forms that save, alter, or delete your data. This leads to incidents of corrupt themes, lost posts, and broken features that we are unable to protect against.
Privacy: Browser hacks interpose themselves between you and Tumblr, meaning they have access to your email address, password, IP address, search queries, and the contents of your private posts and Dashboard. We have no way of controlling what they do with this information.
Performance: The unsupported method of “page scraping” causes your browser to make excessive requests to Tumblr’s servers during normal browsing. When our load balancers detect this, they automatically trigger throttling to protect the servers from being overrun. This presents as errors and slower response times.
Support: Because the issues that arise often appear to be problems with Tumblr, our support team is frequently flooded with erroneous reports of problems we didn’t cause and can’t fix. To keep these from overwhelming our support team, we’ve had to begin bouncing emails from these users.
We didn’t click OK on the box. Why should we? We certainly don’t think it’s cool that they’re asking us to choose between a plugin and receiving technical support for our account.
I just received this as well. For people who manage multiple blogs or post frequently, Missing-E is a huge timesaver. I don’t understand Tumblr’s strategy here: instead of incorporating a lot of the good, if obvious, enhancements offered by Missing E (why the extension has become so wildly popular among Tumblr users in the first place), Tumblr continues to try and block the extension altogether. Instead of booting its maker (Jeremy Cutter) off their API and hinting at suing him, they should be giving him a job. He is the kind of dedicated person most companies should want as an add-on developer.
This is such nonsense. There’s a reason Missing E is so popular, Tumblr: it offers countless (basic) features that all of your users want but that you have failed to develop. Indeed, you don’t seem to develop new features at all, but instead spend your time producing splash pages that present an ultimatum between the functionality I desire (provided only by Missing E) and (the already nonexistent and impossible to find) support for my account.
Go fuck yourself, Tumblr. And keep on fucking yourself until the blood runs hot or you get a clue and actually put some effort into developing native versions of the features all of your users want.
