Murfeelee's SECOND Backup Blog

ACK! I got hit!

Hi, Simblr community. Murf here, from murfeelee.tumblr,com

As I effing expected, Tumblr terminated my account today too, over the exact same nonsense that recently hit @katsujiiccfinds here and @desiree-uk here.

I contacted @staff at Tumblr Support about it today, and even tried to make a backup account to tell y’all about it earlier today, but Tumblr banned that account too, so now I’m trying to get BOTH accounts back, FML.

This frikkin SUCKS, Tumblr--WHY are y’all making it so dang hard to make people want to even BOTHER with this site anymore? PLEASE do something about these nasty instant-terminations--at least the Flagging system warns us in advance, and just hides posts that aren’t allowed anymore, so do the same thing for posts with hyperlinks to outside websites you don’t want us linking to and clicking!!! 

How is it acceptable that are you are insta-banning simmers for reblogging content y’all LET US reblog in the first place? It’s THE SIMS, Tumblr--we’re not reblogging anything graphic or hateful or anything; we’re just trying to play with virtual Barbie dolls. (What on earth did that site (starting with a D) which shall not be named even do? O_O It was YEARS OLD reblogs of LACE DOILIES, DECORATIVE AIR CONDITIONERS, and GLASS FURNITURE, for crissakes! HIDE THE CHILDREN!)

I actually tried to delete the compromised posts on my CC Finds sideblogs, but lo and behold, the stupid posts wouldn’t even delete, and kept popping back up!

(Fun fact: I couldn’t even get my account termination letters at the Contact Support page to go through -- I had to keep resubmitting them before the buttons would stop getting stuck in an endless loop--like REALLY? I can’t even do what you all tell us to do @staff. It’s not even watching what we reblog (the whole frikkin point of Tumblr, jfc) -- it's watching what we’ve ALREADY reblogged and are trying to get rid of, that can set Tumblr’s trigger-happy algorithm off.

So yeah, that’s my frikkin life right now, y’all. (－‸ლ)

Just in case they ban this account too, y'all can still see my archived CC posts at the Wayback Machine: (it might load super slow at first, at least for me it did?) Build/Buy Page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210125145904/https://murfeelee.tumblr.com/sims3cascc CAS CC Page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210125145904/https://murfeelee.tumblr.com/sims3cascc

And my SFS backups are all here & here.

How can you evict buttons from getting distorted when adding morphs?

Really don't know how, and you have no idea how it would help me and her, since buttons are the devil when converting stuff!

(Sending an ask and not a PM just so other people can know this info, if you have it, of course!)

☽✶•.¸(✶•.¸★¸.•✶´)¸.•✶´☾ ☆«´¨`•°°•´¨`»☆    ☽.¸.•✶(¸.•✶´★`✶•.¸)`✶•.☾

Welcome to Murf’s School of Crap and Crap-Making!

School Motto: Prepare to be tortured! For Science!

Lesson #22: Loosen Up My Buttons, Babe! ♪♫♬

☽✶•.¸(✶•.¸★¸.•✶´)¸.•✶´☾ ☆«´¨`•°°•´¨`»☆    ☽.¸.•✶(¸.•✶´★`✶•.¸)`✶•.☾

Buttons are indeed the devil, especially when they're just painted-on textures, in which case forget about it. XD

But if they're 3D buttons, I’ve found that directly editing the group_fat mesh morph itself worked, when things like buttons distort when adding fit/fat morphs. Even with the god-tier Mesh Toolkit, which automatically assigns morphs based on...IDK witchcraft or something, manually tweaking morphs is still sometimes necessary.

So, what I did was open the morphed outfit with 3D buttons in question in TSRW, Export the mesh, and Import it into Milkshape.

Then Hide the group_base mesh and all of its morphs, so that the only one visible is group_fat.

Select the vertices for the buttons that are distorted.

Scale the buttons down (by click/dragging the mouse till you see it change shape & size) so that they return to a more spherical shape that’s less oblong and distorted. Rescale them so that they shrink horizontally, and don't look so stretched.

Export the mesh from Milkshape, and Import it back into TSRW.

Click NO at the popup window about optimizing the vertex data.

And click Yes to update the Bounding Box.

And the buttons will be fixed!

You'll likely want to repeat the steps for the Medium Level Detail group_fat lod, and Low Level Detail group_fat lod. But honestly, the buttons are likely to look misshapen by default in lower detail anyway, because of all the lower polys. :\ It really doesn’t matter with the other LODs.

Just Export your new clothes, install, and viola!

In light of the ongoing instant-bans that have been targeting numerous Simblr accounts lately, I’m curious: exactly how many of us in The Sims’ videogaming community have been hit by Tumblr’s inept bans before?

Regardless of when it happened (last week or last year, it still happened); regardless of whether you successfully got your account restored or not; and regardless of whether @staff gave you any explanation why or why or not--how many of y’all have suffered from Tumblr’s automated bots and algorithms flagging your account and terminating it without warning?

Recently, more and more simmers have been asking questions about what can be done, not just to restore lost accounts, but most importantly: how to protect current accounts that could still fall victim to automatic termination. It is a sad state of affairs when the community has to educate ourselves, left in the dark with nothing but radio silence, when @staff @support themselves does nothing to promptly answer tickets submitted to https://www.tumblr.com/support, and fail to take adequate action by providing meaningful ways to help its user base with proper safeguards, algorithmic responses (warnings, etc.), or community-wide public outreach when asked directly about the situation.

As Tumblr drags its feet in silence, more blogs can be shut down with none the wiser for it. Some blogs are never recovered or return, and if not for @katsujiiccfinds here and @desiree-uk here coming forward with details about their own account terminations, the Sims community would have likely never known about the potential threat of certain rebloggable outbound links that can cause automatic terminations. But as seen in cases like mine here, sometimes being forewarned doesn’t necessarily guarantee being forearmed. And in cases like @three-stars-ranch & @studiok2sims last week and @darkccfinds & @mspoodle1 last year, and so many more simblrs in-between--they had no clue why their accounts were suddenly banned without warning--with accounts like @aisquaredchoco and @studiok2sims being restored just as suddenly and also without any explanation.

This is a totally unacceptable way to run a social media website and treat one’s user base, and something must be done.

themaresnestdumblr reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

For the love of freakin’ PLUMBOB!

Lucky this lot aren’t in charge of anything more substantial …

‘We’ve had a look into the issue, and it was an algorithm that caused all those nuclear missiles to fire triggering a full scale nuclear war.

Our technical team at Dumblr will fix the issue as soon as civilisation is restored in a thousand year’s time and has defeated the two headed mutant wasp race and their witch king that have taken over the planet.’

THIS TOOK ME CLEAN TF OUT!! 🤣

Rather than me having a good time on my main Sims 3 simblr account (murfeelee.tumblr.com which recently fell victim to Tumblr’s insta-ban spree)--posting my regular Weekend! Replies!, queuing up gameplay posts & TS3 CC--instead I’m hunkered down in the trenches tryna decide WHAT DO DO NEXT.

soupiesoupsimblr reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

What the heck… What are we gonna do.. Do we leave.. Or stay and fight?

doka-chan reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

#Really #Like REALLY ??!!!!!! #Seriously #@staff #This is nonsense and it has to end #We love Tumblr #Don't give us excuses to hate it #Please

sugar-sugarsims replied to your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

This is what they want us to pay for? Gradient boxes and random auto deletes? I think not. I just hope my cc blog doesn’t get hit. 😔

dreamsongsims reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

I feel like the entire sims community needs an emergency location where we can all meet up post Tumpolcalypse. I hate the thought of our little community being purged and culled with no way to get back to each other. Ridiculous!

Even if/when Tumblr restores my account, and the accounts of fellow simmers who are being sniped (I just heard that Toreno-Werty got banned yesterday, too @three-stars-ranch WTF--not to mention everyone else who told me about their bans), that’s not going to solve the underlying problem with this hellsite.

It’s been increasingly obvious that Tumblr and @staff’s reliance on its fundamentally flawed and BROKEN algorithm have alienated and downright driven away whole swathes of its user base. The infamous Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse first started purging the site of all kinds of content, to pander to Apple’s apps (which whaddaya know is neck-deep in an antitrust lawsuit vs Epic Games for bad business practices).

Sinking Ship: Tumblr/Simblr Alternatives?

Ever since December 17th, Tumblr users have seen the mass flagging, shadowbanning, Sensitive Content soft-bans, and instant termination of posts and accounts at large, which have led to several exoduses off of the platform for different, safer microblogging alternatives.

The Sims’ community of videogamers for TS1, TS2, TS3 and TS4 also fell victim to Tumblr’s nonsense, and numerous posts circulated ideas about the simblr community needing to move elsewhere, or better yet: creating out own Sims blogging website, some even making kickstarters to try creating one.

Unfortunately, these ideas weren’t able to get off the ground, as it’s EFFING HARD to run a website--costly, complex, and thankless to boot. We’ve all seen the constant pressure put on SimFileShare to carry the entire simming community all these years, as a Sims-specific FREE filesharing host for our terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zetabytes, and yottabytes of CC.

One of the main deterrents to simblrs not leaving Tumblr as we rightly should’ve, is the plain simple fact of the matter that every alternative lacked some feature or another that Tumblr excels at. Be it site features (reblogs, tags, mentions, themes, media hosting, site import/export); integral user innovations (New X-Kit); the free and easy access (versus paywalls on Pillowfort & co.), we have all been trapped in this abusive relationship with Tumblr, for want of a better place to go.

Unless a better website is made, either by us or someone else, we’re stuck here. So what can be done about it?

Tumblr’s Auto-Bans, and the Reblogged Link Fiasco

The main allure is Tumblr’s large community presence & participation itself. The Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse lost Tumblr 1/3 of its entire user base in one fell swoop. There are tens of thousands of Simblrs across The Sims’ games. But crazy enough, these arbitrary auto-bans are ruining the one thing that kept us here--what’s the point of sticking around if you or someone you follow can get INSTANTLY kicked off the site under these spurious flaggings!? Especially if Tumblr does EFF ALL to make sure it doesn’t happen again?!

ny-sims reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

@staff soooo are you keeping this same energy for the racism, homophobia, or sexually graphic content too??? How many accounts will be deleted without notice before y’all fix the problem??? 🙄🙄🙄🙄

So I have zero confidence that merely getting our accounts back will fix things--the OLD links/posts are still out there; having been reblogged dozens if not hundreds of times. Innocent simblrs are being shut down left and right lately--one site gets restored, and two more get banned the next day. This is LITERALLY what happened to me, Desiree-uk, and Toreno-Werty, within HOURS of each other.

https://three-stars-ranch.tumblr.com/post/658800265616588800/hi-guys-its-me-toreno-werty-today-for-some

Even if Tumblr bothers to contact you, and deigns to grace you with an actual explantion, rather than leaving you in the effing dark, lately it’s tended to be because of reblogged links

xldkx replied to your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

they'll hit you if you reblog anything with adfly on it. be careful. also they do not like outbound links bc your stuff gets shadowbanned in the tag.

Exactly. And one outbound link in particular:

https://desiree-uk.tumblr.com/post/658600853646770176/my-account-has-been-restored

Reblogs, by their very nature, are PERVASIVE, so what do we do when years -old reblogged content is buried deep in our blogs--partcularly those links that are not immediately apparent to even be from flagged sites????

ny-sims replied to your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

@staff it’s 2021 yall.. there has to be a better way to filter content. Deleting entire accounts is extreme af! And on top of that. The Sims community is a big reason for Tumblrs survival. Let’s be real, not many use this damn site anymore 🤷🏽‍♀️ idc idc!

ktarsims reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

This is absurd. If an old reblog contains bad content, can’t you just delete the original post and all reblogs? Or are your moderation tools so poor that you can’t? Banning whole accounts for old reblogs which are glitchy and can’t even be deleted is ridiculous. #tumblr fails

catbrokensims3 reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”

This is just so disheartening. I don’t understand why @staff can’t delete the posts rather than the whole blog? Then give the blog owner some warning when posts are deleted so they can do something and/or know that reblogs that used to be okay no longer are? We’re losing potentially valuable content to our community here. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater big time and it’s sad. #sims #what is going on #why

Tumblr’s claimed to be making the site better and more positive and other BULLSHITE before, but ever since the Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse things have just gone from bad to worse. If Tumblr’s blatant handwaving of the Post+ backlash is anything to go by, @staff  just said EFF ALL Y’ALL, and DOUBLED DOWN on their nonsense, regardless of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS who spoke out against them going forward with paid subscriptions and filled out the survey Tumblr clearly IGNORED.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/22/tumblr-community-lash-out-post-plus-subscription/

It’s been 3 years since we faced this kind of continued barrage from @staff, and one paying to the signs seriously has to wonder if Ragnarok is finally upon us, after 3 years of Fimbulwinter.

Is the Simblrpocalypse inevitable? What can we do to protect/backup or content?

Last week I opened my own Wix account. However, I’ve always had trouble with Wix--it’s so HEAVY and SLOW, and bogs down my PC evey time I use it--let alone try to build my own. So it’s been VERY slow going for me to get my Wix page in a state where I can publish it, but I AM working on one, so I can at least have a place other than Tumblr to post my CC releases. 

And as for Wordpress backups, the last time I imported my Tumblr blog it glitched and made duplicates of every post, thus going over my storage space so that Wordpress won’t let me make new poists on that account. I made another Wordpress account, but AFAIK there’s no function on Wordpress’ Tumblr Import feature to pick and choose which posts we want to import -- it just imports the whole blog, which is unnecessary in my case, since I already have another Wordpress import for 2013-2018 -- I just want everything from 2019-2021 Imported. (And if I don't get my account back I can’t Import it anyway, which makes Wordpress moot).

So, other than Wix and/or Wordpress, what else is out there for us?

Wix might be our best bet for cataloguing CC, for those of us who make it. But what about community engagement? Places like Sims 3 Updates and My Sims 3 Blog migrated to TS4-only years ago, so Tumblr became the main hub for promoting new releases through reblogs. This was particularly effective after the rise of CC Finds Blogs like the late great Lana--another blog that got banned during the Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse, and never recovered. And several major CC Finds Blogs have been hit at least once by Tumblr’s ban since then, too.

A few weeks.months ago, when @mspoodle1​, @darkccfinds​, and @katsujiiccfinds​ got banned, I started considering backing up my stuff, but it was only once @desiree-uk​​  confirmed last week that it was still happening that I knew I needed to do something, and made my Wix account. As a fellow CC finds reblogger with 5 sideblogs dedicated to reblogging Sims content (including fancifults3cc.tumblr.com, scifits3ccblog.tumblr.com and ninthcirclets3cc.tumblr.com), I naturally expected to get hit next, and I was right. But if we’re all too scared to reblog content anymore, the Simblr community dies, as it’s through reblogs and tags/mentions that we let our followers know about the CC being made, and support simmers in the community. 

There seems to be no simple solution. Yes, we all want our blogs back, and we want this whole reblog/link issue to be fixed, with Tumblr’s @staff​​ finally providing a reasonable way to get rid of the bad links/posts themselves, NOT our whole account. Kicking people off the platform will only lead its users to continue losing faith in Tumblr’s longterm ability to maintain this website--let alone its ability to show any sign of care or consideration for the accounts investing so much time and energy into keeping the platform relevant.