What to do if your account gets wrongfully terminated
So by now most of you have probably heard that my account was suddenly terminated (aka banned) on Saturday afternoon. I’m back now, and since I had to do some digging into this on my own, I figured I’d make a post for others to reference.
How to tell if you’ve been wrongfully terminated
You will find yourself suddenly locked out of your account. For me, I had just made a post when I got kicked to the login screen. My password wouldn’t work, so I tried to reset it, at which point I got this screen:
Now, if Tumblr legitimately terminated your account - meaning, you broke a rule and they banned you for it - they should send you an email telling you why. So, immediately check your email. If you don’t get anything, it was probably a glitch. These happen shockingly often, so there’s a whole process to it.
How to get your account back
First, submit a support ticket. Tumblr’s support email does NOT work, you MUST go through their site. Select ‘Terminated account’. Write a POLITE message explaining the situation. Describe what you were doing when you suddenly got kicked off, and state that to the best of your knowledge, you haven’t broken any rules, or that if you did, you would be willing to delete the offending posts. Include your url and email.
Check your email. You should immediately get an automatic message saying they’re looking into the problem. If you don’t that means that Tumblr marked your email as spam (because they banned you). If you need to, resend the ticket using a different email address at the bottom. Explain that your account email doesn’t seem to be going through and that’s why you’re using a different one.
Wait. Tumblr Support’s hours of operation are 9-5 EST, Monday through Friday. If, like me, you submitted your ticket on a weekend, you may be in for a wait. If you don’t get a response within 24 hours, DO NOT SEND ANOTHER TICKET, but instead reply to the email they sent you. I’ve seen it advised that you should send another ticket only if the problem isn’t fixed within the week.
Check you url often. Tumblr will likely never respond to your email letting you know what happened or that you’ve been reinstated. Check your url every so often, and if it finally loads as your blog (instead of the ‘There’s nothing here’ screen) you are free to log back in.
And that’s it! If it was a glitch, they SHOULD reinstate your account, but you MUST submit a support ticket letting them know what’s going on.
5 YEAR OLD POST SORTA KINDA SAVES ME FROM ETERNAL CONFUSION YAAAAAHHHH
Okay, so, in the years since writing this guide, I’ve both seen some discussion as well as made my own observations that lead me to believe this is not just a glitch with Tumblr’s code.
More likely, if you’re reading this because you got termed, your blog was caught up in a bot dragnet.
Tumblr, like all social media, has bots. And Tumblr also does regular bot purges. It’s strikingly clear to me when these purges happen, because this post will gain a ton of notes in the span of a day. Occasionally, but not always, this will happen shortly after I notice an influx of bot followers.
That means that, for most people experiencing this problem, you are doing something that triggers Tumblr’s automated bot removal process. I cannot say what it is. Social media tends to keep their bot removal criteria vague, so that people scripting bots can’t evade capture.
Which sucks for the innocent human bloggers caught up in the purges, but it also means that if you can get someone to double check your blog, you should be reinstated pretty swiftly.
My blog has not been termed again, but if you check the notes of this post, you will see plenty of people who got their blog back using this process, many of them in the last few months. So these steps should still work.
Relevant to me right now!
I would like to add a note, make sure Tumblr itself is in a good working order before you send your support request. I tried to email twice during the last remains of the outage the other day, only to go “….shouldn’t they have emailed me by now?” several hours later. Resubmitted my ticket and got the insta-email. I can’t say for sure how quickly my blog was reinstated because I was on a plane for much of it, but I can tell you it was within six hours.
