Tumblr's Support Problem with 'Missing e'

Friday, January 6, 2012

Tumblr’s Support Problem with ‘Missing e’

As many users have observed, Tumblr has recently given users a choice to uninstall Missing e or revoke techincal support for your account. Your blog and posts will be safe, but you may not be able to contact Tumblr’s support team.

The reasons they give for suggesting that you uninstall Missing e are the worst-case scenario for installing browser extensions or browser modifications of any kind. However, Missing e is not a source of these kinds of problems.

At worst, Missing e may cause problems when Tumblr makes changes to their interface and Missing e has not yet been updated to deal with the changes. I usually work very quickly to restore compatibility in these cases.

It is very unlikely that Missing e will cause any data loss. This is especially true of existing posts. Without your interaction, Missing e will not delete anything!

As for privacy, Missing e does not obtain, use or store your email address, password, IP address, search queries or contents of any of your existing posts.

Missing e implements only a small amount of what Tumblr calls page scraping. It is not done regularly, nor is it excessive. The removed features Follow Checker and Unfollower used page scraping a lot more and were taken out of Missing e quite some time ago for this very reason.

All users are encouraged to examine Missing e’s source code to confirm all of the claims I have made!

If you choose to continue using Missing e and want to continue receiving support, you should follow these guidelines:

• If you experience problems with Tumblr, deactivate Missing e in your browser’s extensions list (you can get to this list using the first part of the Missing e uninstall instructions and turning off “Enable” or clicking on the “Disable” button, depending on your browser). If the problem remains, it is most likely not a Missing e issue.

• Before contacting Tumblr support, deactivate Missing e. Regardless of whether or not you acknowledged that using Missing e means Tumblr will not provide you with support, if you have it deactivated or uninstalled, it is not running! You will be accurately presenting your issue to Tumblr support in informing them that you are not currently using Missing e.