ⓕairy ⓑites

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

garaks-padded-bra (not) reported by dungeonsanddragonsfifthedition and pegglefan69 and at least one other person, and then banned based on the bug apparently (all GarakPB does is post about star trek, ive never seen them break site TOS at all)

bobacupcake (not) reported by snarp for saying "h-hello??"

pjackk (not) reported by orcboxer for saying "Bulgaria is Following in Greece's Footsteps. Here's How We Stop It." and then getting banned for it(???!!!)

no i dont think anyone on tumblr staff is doing this on purpose, there's no political or personal reason that would target this kind of thing at a star trek goof blog and a nice little illustration blog or a funny blog about medievalisms. i mean sure pjackk had enemies from killing all those dogs but this just looks like a really weird bug. much like pjackk

you can put any email into the reporting form as the reporting party, whether the email is registered to tumblr or not. the Name field doesnt do anything. i just tested it. it doesnt validate for tumblr username. the only information the tumblr report form requires is an email address. so now im wondering if anyone outside tumblr has gotten these emails, and if so who, and for which reports.

i just tested this by opening a private window, reporting one of the rape threat bots from my earlier post, and filling in an email that i have not registered to tumblr. interestingly, logged-in tumblr users can one-click report spam, logged-out users have to provide a text paywall paragraph even for spam reports. everyone has to pass the textwall to report stuff other than spam. but for some reason ZenDesk doesn't seem to care if someone is reporting a tumblr TOS violation as a tumblr user or not. which seems.............like a mistake, in terms of moderation handling.

this means mass reporting, botnets, scripts, and random reporting dont even need a working tumblr account to be logged in to be reporting from. anyone can navigate their simple macro script to the reporting form and run it all day and night, reporting nonsense by pulling URLs from someone's tumblr account. so if bad actors are actually exploiting this reporting form in this way, it would certainly explain why tumblr support is swamped in bullshit reports, and why they have recently started making people fill in up to two paragraphs of explanation about how exactly something breaks TOS (paragraphs which are also trivially easy to bypass, as all users of r9k discovered exactly five minutes after that board went up)

WHY WOULD SOMEONE DO THIS? idk, this is sort of the least mysterious part of the mystery and also the most impossible to answer. for a really popular account like pjackk, popular accounts make a lot of enemies even if they are well-liked, so that could have been personal. or it could have been because his username is just really visible and therefor easy for data validation crawlers to grab and put in a database of "known active tumblr users". garakPB and bobacupcake dont have any obvious enemies except maybe "bigots generally" and the "bigots generally" motivation could certainly be responsible for some of the banned trans woman waves also. but their reports/bands seem more like noise to me and not targeted harassment, just my own reckon. most of the traffic of the internet at this point is ads and crawlers and botnets and a lot of it is shit like this that doesnt really serve a clear purpose and isnt necessarily malicious (but could be). trying to nail down motivations is pointless because much of it is just noise, people testing scripts, people forgetting scripts are running, people selling scripts to other people, etc

if your email address has ever been public anywhere, or ever on a have-i-been-pwned list, it could be used for spoofing reports. and if you run a report-spoofing script long enough pulling random posts, eventually tumblr support will either receive a report that can be interpreted as rulebreaking if they squint, or whatever automated behavior that may happen after X number of reports on a single blog is surpassed may kick in and cause some sort of autoban that then needs to be appealed by a human and then approved by a human to get past, which takes so long (due to the support backlog) that most banned accounts just assume they were banned 1. for actual TOS violation and have no appeal or 2. by a sinister behind the scenes conspiracy that they cant fight, and have no appeal or 3. that the support backlog is so long that appealing is going to take months or years so they might as well remake (which means they are ban evading, which means they are automatically violating TOS, which means if they get reported again for ban evading they will just keep getting banned even if the initial ban was a mistake)

i havent checked if tumblr "forgot my login" form can be crawled for validation easily or not but if it cant now, it probably used to be at some point, and if you have an old tumblr account and have ever received a "forgot your password?" email then yeah some database somewhere probably knows your email is registered to your tumblr account.

ENHANCE

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.