Less Broken Than You Think

Did you enjoy April 1st last week? So did we! We loved those purchasable features so much, we stole ‘em!

_{Not the horse, though. Horses are pretty hard to steal. They’re stubborn, and strong.}

But that leaves arguably the best three things from the 1^st of April in our sack of loot - framed avatars, the “tumbler” logo, and yes, AOL Instant Messenger. Downloadable now from the gallery, the April Fool’s extension brings those things back to your dashboard! Enjoy the jokes all year-round!

As always, if these jokes backfire horribly, our askbox and live support Discord server are always open or you can open an issue on GitHub!

Do you like seeing individual reblog notes? Do you enjoy consuming the delicious tags? Do you flourish off a generous diet of #literally dying #same #me #kin? Did @staff destroy your lifestyle by opting you into the notes rollup test?

Activity+ version 0.4.0 brings a new feature which unrolls the rollups. Download or update Activity+ in your local XKit. If you already have Activity+ installed it should automatically update in the next few days; we’re very proud of it.

Reclaim the tags! Rejoice as you gaze upon each and every sap who reblogged your post! Revive your ability to click on notes to see the original post!

As always, if you have any questions, you can stop by our live support chat (on Discord), swing by our always open ask box, or even send us fan mail!

This release fixes a potential security issue due to the expiration of xkitcs.com’s registration. You should see this release start to trickle down automatically over the next couple days.

Don’t want to wait for your XKit to automatically update? Check out 7.8.2′s release page for the version of XKit suitable for your browser.

As always, if you have any questions, you can stop by our live support chat (on Discord), swing by our always open ask box, or even send us fan mail!

A lot of people are currently having issues with New XKit being unable to reach the update servers. This is due to an update of the EasyPrivacy adblocker list, which is integrated into most, if not all, large adblockers. 

As it stands, it seems only people running slightly outdated versions of Chrome are experiencing this issue.

In order to resolve the issue, either turn off your adblocker temporarily or update to the newest version of Chrome. The EasyPrivacy authors noted that these blocks are temporary, and we hope that they will be removed soon.

If you have any questions, feel free to send an ask to our support blog or visit our live support channel. Thank you for your patience. 

Hello, all! Brand new feature update coming your way!

We’ve had some requests for the addition of an easy way to unfollow users who are highlighted by Find Inactives as having been inactive for a long period of time. With Find Inactives 0.4.0 this is now made a lot easier; each inactive blog will have an unfollow button next to it for quick clicks to remove them from your following list!

Thanks for reading! As always, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to let us know by stopping by the chat room, sending an ask to @new-xkit-extension​, or opening an issue on Github.

Welcome to the future! New XKit 7.8.0 is a comprehensive update of our base extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari with a bunch of improvements. New XKit is now fully a WebExtension on both Firefox and Chrome, which allows us to share the browser support code between both platforms. Most importantly, this means that your XKit will continue working on Firefox Quantum.

New XKit 7.8.0 should be automatically downloaded for you through your browser’s normal update process.

Note for Firefox users: You must already have New XKit 7.7.7 or higher for your data to be automatically transferred to 7.8.0. If you have a lower version, download 7.7.7′s xpi first at its release page. If you run into any trouble, follow the steps in this new-xkit-support post.

Also for Firefox users: If you have problems with One-Click Postage after updating, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. Check out this post on new-xkit-support for more information.

Don’t want to wait for your XKit to automatically update? Check out 7.8.0′s release page for the version of XKit suitable for your browser.

As always, if you have any questions, you can stop by our live support chat (on Discord), swing by our always open ask box, or even send us fan mail!

Hey everybody, sorry for the delay in getting this out, but this release should solve the problems people were having with 7.7.6. If you’re using Firefox and you’re currently on 7.7.5 you need to upgrade to this version within the next 6 weeks to avoid possibly losing access to your settings. You can update to 7.7.7 by going to Tools > Addons > click the gear icon > “Check for Updates”

Firefox version 57 (currently on Nightly) removes support for “legacy extensions”, which includes Addon SDK extensions like New XKit. New XKit 7.7.7 is still technically a legacy extension, but it uses what’s called an “embedded WebExtension” to migrate your stored settings to the new version. That means that when we release New XKit 7.8.0, which will be a non-legacy WebExtension, all of your data will still be there.

If you’re currently using Firefox Nightly, then you’ll have to downgrade to an older version like Beta or Release to migrate your settings, if you didn’t have 7.7.6 installed already.

Users with lots of extensions, saved posts, or similar are also highly encouraged to make local XCloud backups of their data for peace-of-mind. As always, if you have any questions, you can stop by our live support chat (on Discord), swing by our always open ask box, or even send us fan mail!

Hello everyone! In today’s New XKit update, we’re laying the groundwork for supporting Firefox 57′s release. This update adds WebExtension support for XKit and includes a migration step to make sure everyone keeps the same config both before and after the change. Because WebExtensions will be the only platform supported for Firefox going forward, it’s important that you install this update so you can continue to access your config in future versions.

Immediately after upgrading you may encounter a brief pause where Tumblr or Firefox ceases to respond to you for a couple seconds before everything runs normally. This is should only happen if you are running Firefox on a toaster made out of wood, but we want to make sure that you know there is nothing to be afraid of.

Your XKit should update automatically within the next few days, but if you want to hurry the process along, you can download it directly from https://github.com/new-xkit/XKit/releases/firefox-v7.7.6/ (XPI file)

New XKit can only exist because of net neutrality. Every time @staff’s improvements to Tumblr cause one of our extensions to stop working we need to update every XKit around the world with a less broken version. This requires a sizable amount of network traffic that can be throttled or blocked if we lose net neutrality.

We would like to join @staff in calling for you to take action. We need to fight against ISPs like Verizon who after acquiring Tumblr restricted and censored their pro-net-neutrality statements.

Please act now by visiting Dear FCC, Battle for the Net, or Mozilla to send a comment. If you can, email or call your representatives in congress to ask them to join you in speaking out against the FCC’s attempts to kill net neutrality.

Hello, XKit users! A number of you have reported recent issues in Editable Reblogs and One-Click Postage preventing you from using those extensions in Firefox. We have just released a fix for these errors, so if you update your XKit extensions (Other tab in the XKit control panel, click “Update All My Extensions”), the issue should be resolved.

Thanks for your patience and to everyone who reported the issue! As always, feel free to send us an ask or leave a message in our support chat if you need any assistance!

Hello! As some of you may already know, Tumblr pushed a major update to the activity page yesterday. Consequently, a few of our extensions are going to be broken until we’re able to update them. This should be a relatively painless process, but it may take a few days! In the mean time, please don’t reinstall XKit or panic or anything like that. As long as you’re on New XKit version 7.7, you’ll get the new updates as soon as they are available.

Extensions that we’ve written a fix for, and should be ready for release sometime today:

• Retags (showing tags on the activity page)
• NotificationBlock (hiding notes on the activity page)

Extensions that we know are broken, but are still waiting on a fix:

• Activity+ (Filter notifications by type, group notifications by post, add notification timestamps)
• One-click reply (post replies)
• Classic Notifications
  

Thanks for your patience! As always, feel free to let us know if you have any comments or questions by stopping by our support chat room (if it seems quiet, leave a message and we’ll see it later), sending a message to @new-xkit-support, or opening an issue in our Github issue tracker.

Make sure to check back to this blog for any updates! We’ll be editing the post throughout the day with the latest information.

Thanks for your patience, everyone! We’ve just released Editable Reblogs 3.3.7; updating to the most recent version of the extension should restore the ability to post without freezing your browser and will prevent the double posting issue some people were encountering earlier in the day.

As usual, feel free to let us know if you have any comments or questions by stopping by our support chat room (if it seems quiet, leave a message and we’ll see it later), sending a message to @new-xkit-support, or opening an issue in our Github issue tracker.

Hey, all! A bug has just cropped up in the way Editable Reblogs interacts with Tumblr code, causing the page to freeze when you attempt to reblog with the extension enabled. We’re working on a fix right now, but disabling Editable Reblogs should allow you to post normally in the meantime.

Thanks for your understanding and patience. Feel free to stop by our support chat with any questions or issues!

Hey everyone! We accidentally pushed an update to Editable Reblogs this afternoon (2017-1-11) to fix a long-standing bug with video embeds. Unfortunately, it had a severe bug that had the potential to break the extension when a post has an image in it.

This bug has been fixed in ER version 3.3.3. If you’re encountering this issue, where you can’t save or reblog a post with an image in it, you can upgrade Editable Reblogs from the XKit Preferences page:

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone! As always, thank you for your patience! Feel free to let us know if you have any comments or questions by stopping by our support chat room (if it seems quiet, leave a message and we’ll see it later), sending a message to @new-xkit-support, or opening an issue in our Github issue tracker.

As some of you have already noticed, as of last week, 2016-12-08, the NotificationBlock extension (version 1.3.3) for New XKit is currently not correctly blocking reblogs on the activity page. Tumblr has changed the structure of how reblog notifications are displayed on that page and we haven’t yet been able to implement a workaround for that change. However, we’re still working on a potential update and will hopefully have more information soon. Likes are still blocked correctly, and notifications on the Dashboard are also still being blocked correctly.

Thanks for your patience! As always, feel free to let us know if you have any comments or questions by stopping by our support chat room (if it seems quiet, leave a message and we’ll see it later), sending a message to @new-xkit-support, or opening an issue in our Github issue tracker.

Today we released a small update to Editable Reblogs in an attempt to control its effect on the dashboard; we’ve noticed in seeing people use the extension that though it has a significant use case, there are also plenty of situations in which it might not be needed, and in those cases (with the new update) it is damaging the appearance of the post for no reason.

Thus, we have added a trigger on the post window that allows users to opt into the Editable Reblogs Effect (i.e. converting the post to blockquotes) on a post-by-post basis rather than wholesale whenever the extension is enabled:

It’s our hope that this will reduce the amount of unnecessary corruption to the default Tumblr blog structure and make it easier to avoid any broken posts on the dash.

Obviously, we hope that this doesn’t have to be a long term solution, and that we can work out a better way to get back to non-intrusively editing posts without corrupting the reblog structure, but we hope that this strikes a good compromise in the meantime.

As always, feel free to let us know if you have any comments, questions, or encounter any bugs. There’s usually someone available in our support chat room (if not, we’re probably sleeping or carousing wildly so leave a message and we’ll see it later); you can also send a message to @new-xkit-support or open an issue in our Github issue tracker.

Happy blogging!

Many of you have noticed that Editable Reblogs has been having significant difficulties lately as a result of changes to Tumblr’s server-side code. Unfortunately, these changes have rendered ER’s current method of “imitating” Tumblr’s reblog structure impossible.

We have updated Editable Reblogs to 3.2.0 to restore functionality to some degree. However, as a result of these changes, ER at the moment can no longer exactly replicate the reblog structure on the dash; posts made using this update will render all posts in the reblog chain as a single blockquoted post instead of a series of them. 

The XKit team is still actively working to find a way to make Editable Reblogs produce fully formatted posts; however, this interim measure should remove the issue of post content disappearing. The extension can, of course, be disabled at any time through the XKit preferences panel.

Thank you for your patience while we performed this update. As always, if you’re having any problems with New XKit, you can always stop by our support chat room and chat with the developers! There is generally someone there a lot of the time, but you might need to wait for a bit or come back later if no one responds. Other ways you can get in contact with the New Xkit team include sending an ask or submission to @new-xkit-support or by opening an issue on our Github issue tracker.

Short answer: Everything is completely fine. All extensions are intact and the problem should fix itself soon.

Long story: Unfortunately, Github is affected by a massive DDoS attack right now and connections to it are intermittently failing. Since we use Github to host our update data and XKit may not be able to connect to it, this could temporarily affect the ability to download new extensions from the gallery or update existing ones. As soon as the DDoS attack stops and Github resumes its normal operation, XKit will work as usual once more.

As always, our inbox and chat room are open for those with support issues. Thanks!

Hello, everyone! We’re currently aware of an issue affecting users of Editable Reblogs (as of 2016-09-20) which is preventing the extension from working correctly, due to a change in how Tumblr handles submitted posts. We’re looking into possible resolutions for the situation and will post a further update when we have more information. Right now we recommend you disable Editable Reblogs until we can get the situation under control, otherwise Tumblr might accidentally corrupt your post.

As always, our inbox and chat room are open for those with support issues. Thanks!

Hey everyone! nothing really big this week, but we fixed a few long-standing bugs so I wanted to keep you all updated

XKit Patches v6.4.2:

• We fixed the lingering bug that broke uploading videos for a while. This was caused by fallout from the auto-playing video/audio disaster, but due to real life concerns it took a little bit before we had enough time to figure out what was going on (pull request #1136)

Anti-Capitalism v1.4.0

• We added a new option to hide the “Watch on Yahoo View” links that have started showing up recently. (pull request #1135)
  

Show Picture Size v1.0.3

• Fixed a bug which causes stacking of picture size labels in the upper right corner for photo-sets, and another so that we now only hide the label for the currently hovered photo instead of all labels in a photo-set post (pull request #1123)
  

[new!!] Vanilla Audio v0.2.0

• Thanks to contributor @akunohomu, we now have an extension that supplements the standard tumblr audio player with a less buggy one. This is a complement to our existing Vanilla Videos extension, but is also much more useful individually given the unreliability of tumblr’s default audio player. Go grab it from the xkit gallery!
  

That’s all for this week! And as always, if you’re having any problems with New XKit, you can always stop by our helpful support chat room and chat with the developers! There is generally someone there a lot of the time, but you might need to wait for a bit or come back later if no-one responds. Other ways you can get in contact with the new xkit team include sending an ask or submission to @new-xkit-support or by opening an issue on our github

hey everyone! as of tonight we’ve pushed an update that should fix autoplaying audio/video in all of the situations that it occurs, whether triggered by Anti-Capitalism, Blacklist, or another third-party tool. thanks for sticking with us while we trudge waist deep together through the mire of code that comprises Tumblr. trust me—this was truly a sticky bug to unravel.

This update is part of XKit Patches version 6.4.0. You can update XKit Patches using the “Update All” button:

get at us with your feedback! we’re real humans with schedules and sleep cycles and occasionally jobs and stuff, but you can generally reach us in our ask box, our support blog, or our live support chat room. If nobody is online, you always can leave a message for us to read later.

Just a reminder because these posts are spreading farther then our usual audience: We’re a team of developers that run and maintain the New XKit project, a fork of XKit that was started after the original was abandoned in late 2014. New XKit is on version 7.7.1 (chrome, opera), 7.7.3 (firefox), or 7.7.2 (safari). Anything earlier then 7.6.x is old/original XKit, and you’ll need to disable it to install New XKit. (You can migrate your settings, but it’s a little involved—disable for now, and come ask us about it later)

some quick links for those of you who might not have New XKit already:

• Download for Chrome
  
• Download for Firefox
• Instructions for Opera
• Download for Safari

(quick plug again—If you’re interested in helping us run New XKit, for example by answering asks or helping other users with questions + problems, come stop by and introduce yourself! we don’t bite, we promise!)

If you’ve been active on tumblr lately, you may notice that they’ve started running a new type of ad in the right-hand sidebar unit. Specifically, there’s been an uptick in ads that auto-play loud audio, some of which are even un-mutable.

We’ve addressed this in Anti-Capitalism version 1.3.0, which adds a new option:

(small mea culpa: the naming here is slightly confusing. this will *always* remove the sidebar ad, even if it doesn’t happen to be one that plays audio, because we don’t have the ability to distinguish between them. the other difference is that it does it in a way that also takes care of the audio-visual component instead of just hiding the ad, like some adblockers have been doing)

(EDIT: yes, you’ll have to refresh the page after installing the extension/enabling the option. It sounds like this might also conflict with other ad-blockers, so let us know if you have any issues and/or try disabling other adblockers first and see if that fixes the problem)

EDIT 2: as of 7/26, conflicts with other extensions or ad blockers should no longer be an issue.

let us know what you think! I’m probably going to be going to bed soon, but you can always reach us in our ask box, our support blog, or our live support chat. In general the dev team has less time to reply to asks nowadays because of both real-life obligations and the sheer quantity of asks we receive, so you’ll generally have a better time with the support chat, if you can catch one of us online. If nobody is online, you always can leave a message for us to read later. thanks for understanding!

(one last plug—If you’re interested in helping us run New XKit, for example by answering asks or helping other users with questions + problems, come stop by and introduce yourself! we don’t bite, we promise!)

Hey everyone! We just released a few fixes for Editable Reblogs (version 3.1.0), that allow us to more intelligently and gracefully handle some common error conditions. This includes fixing or detecting some of the more debilitating issues, and a new mechanism to help users report less common problems for us to track down. We’ve also programmed in a way for the extension to gracefully fall back on the native functionality in the event of an issue, which should help out a lot.

Rest assured that this is just the beginning of a much more substantial clean-up to make Editable Reblogs less finicky and more reliable. There are still some outstanding issues, including problems with more then one consecutive deactivated url in the same post, but luckily we can now detect and alert you to those issues ahead of time.

As always, our inbox and chat room are open. Happy blogging!

You may have noticed that Tumblr has recently made a change that increases the width of the sidebar and, on some screens, pushes the posts further off-center. We have just released Tweaks version 5.3.0 which adds an option under the User Interface section to get it back to what it was (or at least getting as close as possible). You will get the update eventually, but you can force an update through the “Other” tab of your XKit control panel.

As always, you can get in touch with us by sending an ask to @new-xkit-support or @new-xkit-discussion or visiting our live support chat. If no one responds in the live chat, it means the developers are currently busy/away/sleeping! Just wait a bit and someone will get back to you!

Tumblr changed some things on the background, causing the Tag Viewer extension to load forever. This has now been fixed with version 0.4.2, which will install itself automatically, or you can force an update of your extensions through the “Other” tab in the XKit control panel.

• Soft Refresh
  • v0.5.6: Perform a dark ritual to transform Soft Refreshed posts into real posts with real like buttons.
• Blacklist
  • v2.9.0: Preserve links in Blacklist. Blacklist now reads the links in posts. For example, add goo.gl* to your filters to eradicate 90% of spam spam spam spam spam spammity spam! Many thanks to community contributor PalanteJon for their work in producing this update.
• Hermes
  • v1.2.2: Fix performance issues and caption deletion. Hermes now unloads the images and media of each post once. It also does not delete each post’s caption. These provide 20% more speed per speed and 100% more caption per caption.
• Profiler
  • v1.2.2: Fix parsing error in Profiler. Profiler now actually works instead of displaying an error. Knowledge is power, especially when that knowledge is about blogs.
• One-Click Postage
  • v4.3.0: AlreadyReblogged now adds a checkmark to reblog icon. Like it says on the tin, adds a happy checkmark next to reblogged posts. Turns out that in some cases the green of a “reblogged” post was pretty hard to distinguish from the grey, especially for users with colorblindness. You’ve probably already seen this change already—there were a few pretty popular posts about it.
• Go-To-Dash
  • v1.2.1: Fix Go To Dash ‘View’ button. The “View” button was only 1px high, so we fixed this shortage by stealing some buttons from the Coraline set.
• Retags
  • v1.0.6: Add a new API key. For a few hours, Retags was completely broken and everyone was seeing 401 errors everywhere. Normally we’d say blame Tumblr, but to be honest we have no idea why the old API key stopped working.

Hey everybody! A few quick notes on behind the scenes stuff:

• Old Sidebar (formerly estufar’s sidebar fix before it was contributed to New XKit proper) broke yesterday due to some code changes on Tumblr’s end. We’ve gotten it squared away now, so if you’re still seeing weird behavior with the account menu/sidebar, try “Updating All” in the Other tab of the XKit menu. Go give @estufar some props for the quick fix!
  
• Seems like Tumblr is having some intermittent API availability issues today. Accordingly, some extensions that rely on tumblr API data may not work or may return errors. We’ve confirmed issues with Retags, Blog Tracker, and a few others. Nonetheless, if you see something, do make sure to come and report it! We’re a little behind on answering asks as most of the devs are currently inactive due to school/RL stuff, so the best way to report an issue is to hop in our support chat and leave a message. Even if we can’t respond right away (notifications for chat on our end can be a little laggy sometimes), we’ll definitely see the message eventually.

thanks for sticking with us! I know the past few months we’ve been pretty dead. Hopefully with summer starting we’ll all have more time to work on stuff :D

The good news: Tumblr is bringing replies back. The bad news: they changed the design of the notes display, which broke the Retags extension. The XKit team is aware of this issue and working on a fix which should be out soon.

Additionally, some of you may have noticed that TagViewer and ReplyViewer have only been showing a small amount of tags/replies on some posts. We’re still investigating this problem, but it appears that when a post hits approximately 1,000 notes, the amount of replies or tags you can see drops off sharply. This doesn’t seem to be something we can fix immediately, or possibly at all, but we’ll keep looking into it. So far, this only affects posts that are about 2 months old or newer, but it’s possible that older and older posts will be affected as time goes on. We’ll make sure to let you know more as more information becomes available, and you can track the progress of this issue on github here: https://github.com/new-xkit/XKit/issues/1003

EDIT: its possible this may have also been an artifact of the replies changes, and preliminary testing (so far only one of our devs has the new update) suggests that this may not be an issue with the new notes popup.

Thanks for your patience; as always, you can get in touch with us by sending an ask to @new-xkit-support or @new-xkit-discussion or visiting our live support chat. If no one responds in the live chat, it means the developers are currently busy/away/sleeping! Just wait a bit and someone will get back to you!

If you noticed anti-capitalism not blocking some ads today, rest assured, we just pushed an update that should fix this problem. please let us know if you’re still seeing any ads after updating to anti-capitalism 1.2.4!

If you were waiting for the summary of our Town Hall, here it is! Apologies for the timing, but as they say: better late than never!

As always, you can get in touch with us by sending an ask to @new-xkit-support or @new-xkit-discussion or visiting our live support chat. If no one responds in the live chat, it means the developers are currently busy/away/sleeping! Just wait a bit and someone will get back to you!

It happens to the best of us. We scroll away from a playing audio post, loving and appreciating its heartfelt music, promising to cherish its tunes for the next four minutes. We whisper sweet nothings to the audio post as it disappears up our dashes, gone from our eyes but not our hearts or our ears.

But then we see a Vine. A Vine that promises to scintillate and stupefy if only we could unmute it for just six seconds. A Vine whose whole experience would change our lives if only we could just pause the lovely music playing in our ears for just six seconds.

Let’s dare to take those six seconds back. In Audio+ version 0.4.3, if you scroll away from a playing audio post this cute little BB-8 impersonator will follow you until you close it, helpfully providing the pause and play buttons your short attention span needs.

Get Audio+ 0.4.3 in the New XKit Extensions Gallery or update today.