#follower counts

On the first page, it lists 14 followers. Okay, strange number, but fine. Second page lists 12. Uh. Then on the third page there is one person. That’s it. Why was that last person not on the second page? Also, my “follower count” (the number beside “followers”) is 81. I only have 27 followers that I can count on my page. The page discrepancy is creepy because I have read that the follower pages should have 40 listings each. When I look at my pages, they only display unique entries. So I have 26 ghost followers on the first page, and 28 on the second. 44 ghost followers. That last page only has the first person who ever followed me (@mechromage​, she introduced me to Tumblr, we met at computer science summer camp).

Like, I can understand some discrepancies when the blog in question has a lot of followers. But the problem is that Tumblr believes that I have three times as many followers as I actually do. I have 100% more ghost followers than I do actual ones. This freaks me out. See, when I block someone, the counter usually goes back down, and because I usually catch whoever it is the same day they follow me, the new follower count goes back down too.

I have ranted about this before. Many of the posts I can find about this same issue either have very few notes, or were created by blogs that have since deactivated.

This problem has existed since at least 2012, before Yahoo even bought Tumblr. This stupid bug has been around for 6 years, since before I even started using the platform. And yet with all the new features @staff​ have decided to roll out, this bug has never seemed to get fixed. The only way you can get a completely accurate follower count is through the Tumblr API, by counting unique entries, or by manually scrolling through your follower list and counting each one individually.

This post (whose original author has since deactivated) shows how this may have happened: caching. But fixing the followers page would literally fix everything else. Logically, I should only have one page of followers. Instead I have 3. And this part should be easy! Tumblr already doesn’t display duplicate and deactivated followers. There should be something that goes in and deletes all of the entries that don’t show up on your followers page, and then rearranges the pages so that 40 followers show up on each page. Then, if your “follower count” is the total number of entries (I assume this is stored in something like a vector, where one of the data members is the number of entries, which would get updated whenever one is added or removed), that issue would be fixed too.

The algorithm wouldn’t be that complicated either. I can literally write it right now.

Here is the actual function you would use to remove duplicates, in C++:

void RemoveDuplicateFollowers(int page, int displayedEntries, int removed) {    // entries = vector of followers    int offset = 40;    int start = offset * (page - 1);    int i = start;    int end;

   if (start + offset > entries.size())       end = entries.size() - start;    else       end = offset;

   int duplicates = offset - displayedEntries - removed;

   while (i != end && duplicates != 0) {       int j = i;       while (j != end) {          if (entries.at(i) == entries.at(j)) {             entries.erase(j);             end = end - 1;             duplicates = duplicates - 1;          }          else             j++;       }    } }

(That took maybe 10 minutes to write.) It runs in O(n^2) time. Actual run time would depend on number of duplicates, and where in the list the duplicates are located.

This would be contained within another function that checks the number of unique entries on the page, and would be preceded by a function that gets rid of deactivated blog entries (that returns the number of entries deleted). Like seriously. Not that fucking complicated. (Undefined variables and functions used are pretty self-explanatory.)

There is literally no reason that this is still a problem. That’s why I am so fucking angry about it.