Tumblr Support Fail re:Twitter Imports
After 11 emails back and forth with Tumblr support, I discovered the bullshit reason my Twitter feed hasn’t been showing up here:
You must log into Tumblr frequently or directly post to Tumblr frequently in order for feed imports to remain active.
(from http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/feeds)
I found this little tidbit myself by Googling, and when I asked Tumblr support about it (in email #12), they confirmed it. You’d think somebody in their support would think to mention this phenomenon… but no. I got plenty of explanations and suggestions from them, like:
- “Due to gateway issues, posting to Twitter may at times be delayed”
- “Have you perhaps told Twitter.com to protect your updates?”
- “Our engineers are aware of this issue and will fix it as soon as they can. Thanks for your patience.”
- “You may have already tried this, but it’s possible that the code in your blog’s Description or your custom theme are interfering with the import of your tweets.” (Which the next support person told me was not the issue at all.)
- “The Twitter API is sometimes unavailable.”
- “You might also make sure that you time zone is set correctly.”
But no one thought to tell me that I must “frequently” log-in or post to Tumblr for Twitter feed importing to work. Nevermind that they don’t define what “frequently” is, or clarify if checking Tumblr from a mobile device counts as a log-in.
And, unfortunately for me, I had been relying on Tumblr to pass Twitter posts along to Facebook. So, Facebook barely ever got updates either.
So, great job, Tumblr. Intentionally cripple your product, and then fail to mention this limitation when I’m pulling my hair out trying to get things working.
OK, enough bitching - the solution was to take Tumblr out of the loop. My Facebook now gets updates directly from Twitter. Tumblr will grab tweets if its algorithm decides I’ve been “frequent” enough - but if not, then Tumblr will only get what I post directly to it.
PS: Thanks to the SimpleRNA blog for the post that clued me in to this issue!
