changes:

Changes to Tagged and Search URLs on Tumblr

Heads up! We’re changing the way we parse URLs on tagged and search pages, to properly encode/decode them to support spaces, hyphens, plus signs, and underscores. Most of these changes will be invisible to you, but if you’ve kept bookmarks or links to tagged and search pages on Tumblr or your blog, read on!

We’re going to start this process by rolling out a new setting you can enable when customizing your blog on the web:

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What does it do? Today, and with that toggle disabled, going to a blog’s tagged URL like https://staff.tumblr.com/tagged/tumblr-tuesday would turn “tumblr-tuesday” into “tumblr tuesday” and you’d see posts with that tag. Same with search URLs. If you have that toggle enabled, that https://staff.tumblr.com/tagged/tumblr-tuesday URL will be decoded as “tumblr-tuesday” instead. If you want to link to the “tumblr tuesday” tag on your blog, you’ll have to use “tumblr%20tuesday” in the URL. But this means that if you use certain special characters in your tags, you’ll now properly be able to link to them!

The toggle above gives you early access to figure this all out. On December 1st, 2021, we’ll be enabling this behavior for all blogs on Tumblr.

We’ll update all of the links when you click on tags in Tumblr. However, if you manually added links to your tags in your blog description, theme, somewhere off Tumblr, saved bookmarks, or in posts (like a pinned post on your blog), then you’ll need to update those links if they contain spaces, underscores, or hyphens. Spaces in tags will now be encoded as “%20” rather than “-” or “+”. To do this, turn that toggle on, and click around on your tags to see if any of the URLs changed. Having this setting enabled and updating any links you’ve saved somewhere will future-proof you for when we roll this change out site-wide.

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We hope this is great news for anyone who uses tags in specific ways (we see you!) and has been frustrated that the way to link to them has been inconsistent, or just plain not working since… forever. We’re working on several fixes across Tumblr related to these inconsistencies, but the majority of them require no action on your part.

Please hit us up via Support if you have any questions or concerns about this!

I’m happy that this issue is finally getting some attention.

That said, I’m not happy that the proposed change will break all external links to tag pages, except the ones for tags that are one word.

I know this is a pretty trivial-seeming thing to get worked up about, individual cases of linkrot always seem like that, but when it accumulates and accumulates … linkrot is Bad.

What if, instead, there was a new route for this new behavior, like “/tagged/v2/tumblr%20tuesday”?

The old route (without the v2) would stay functional until it’s time to switch over.

And then the switchover would consist of simply turning the old route into a redirect: “/tagged/tumblr-tuesday” now redirects you to “/tagged/v2/tumblr%20tuesday”.

This seems conceptually feasible, at least, although there may be technical or organizational blockers to it that I don’t know about.