female characters are never allowed to be comic relief or absolute idiots without being sexualised or treated as weak and pathetic. we need more funny women who are stupid as fuck and EMBRACE that. ladies who dont have two braincells to rub together. some absolutely buffoonish girls. its 2018 cmon
Alright, so I should write a longer post about what happened over the past couple days.
I got an email on Saturday morning that the email associated with my account had been changed, so I contacted Support within the hour, as it said to do in the email that got sent to me. I couldn’t access my account during this time since they’d also changed the password as well as the email.
Support sent me a form letter about getting your password back that was not helpful at all. I replied back immediately explaining more about the situation to silence. I kept sending increasingly frantic emails over the course of the day because I was terrified about what would happen to my blog if it was out of my control. I begged Support to at least freeze the account until it got resolved because I was afraid (rightly so) that the bot would start posting porn.
You can imagine my dismay when 6pm rolled around and my queue posted as normal… and then kept posting. I had around a month’s work of posts queued up, including art and such, and it was all getting burned in a matter of hours. Again, I emailed support begging them to do something to no avail.
The next day, I finally did get a response asking for general info, which I provided as quickly as possible, and then… silence again. And lo and behold, just as I suspected would happen, the bot began posting porn. I emailed them several times again begging them to do something, and nothing.
As a result, I got a storm of comments and notes and emails telling me what I already knew - that my account was out of control, and there was nothing I could say or do about it. All I could do was wait for support to get back to me, so I felt frustratingly powerless and helpless, not to mention worried that people who followed me might get hurt by following a bad link. I didn’t know what the bot was doing to my account while I was out of control, and I felt responsible for its bad behavior, but unable to stop it.
Finally, today, I got another email asking to confirm some information from yesterday, which I did immediately, and then… nothing. I resigned myself to having to wait another day for a response, but then something strange happened… I got an email about new followers following me. If I got an email about that, I figured, that means my email must be reattached to an account, right…? So, fingers crossed, I tried to reset the password, AND IT WORKED. TUMBLR FIXED IT AND DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER TO TELL ME.
The good news is, I have control of it again and I turned up security so this should hopefully never happen again. I didn’t lose all my old posts, or my Handplates index, or the people I follow, which I really didn’t want. The posts have been deleted and the queue is cleared, so that was relatively easy to fix. I still have to do a thorough check and fix my layout as well to make sure nothing else got changed.
The bad news is, the bot burned through my entire queue. Everything I’ve drawn got posted, which leaves me kind of up a creek in terms of finding content to post. So, here is my idea… I’ll refill my queue with reblogs of the intended art, and I’ll use that to pad out my queue for a bit while I try to recover from this nonsense. I’m sure some of it got lost in the giant post storm anyway…
A lot of you asked what you could do to help… right now, all I can ask for is your patience and understanding while I try to clean this mess up. The last few days have been enormously stressful and I haven’t been able to get anything done, and having my queue burned up all the way leaves me totally flatfooted. I’m still trying to figure out what to do…
I’m sorry this happened, I tried my best to stop it or fix it, but now all I can do is deal with the aftermath. People have suggested moving off of Tumblr, but where? As a reminder, I do have a Pillowfort and a Twitter, though I barely know how to use Twitter so I wouldn’t have high hopes for that. I also post reliably on Deviantart as well. If something like this happens again, you can check one of those places and see if I’ve made a post about it.
So far it seems like I’ve got this account back and undeleted and HOPEFULLY nothing else will happen from this point on. Hopefully.
Is there anything to be learned from this experience?
Turn on 2-factor authentication
Make sure your Tumblr password is unique
Change your password
Be prepared to wait for days for Tumblr support to get back to you about anything
That’s all I got.
In related news, I spent most of yesterday mirroring the main Handplates pages over on Pillowfort, so you can check out the Pillowfort index and see em all. I actually think the comic looks better on Pillowfort than on Tumblr (all the images are full-res and full-size), so this might be a chance to reread it or read it for the first time if you’re bored.
In the future if something else happens over here, I’m going to try to post a notice or something on my Twitter, so if you’re confused about something that’s going on, hopefully you can check there and get an explanation.
