Ask and Ye Shall Receive: Tumblr Asks are Now Rebloggable

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might not be experiencing exquisite joy and relief right now. I mean, sure, you might be for some reason unrelated to the internet or social media. Takes all kinds. But just in case you aren’t a Tumblr user, you should know about a particular long overdue and clamored for feature that’s just been added to the site, so that you might better understand your Tumblering brethren.

The reason why they’re so excited? Asks are now rebloggable.

What are Asks? Well, see, Tumblr has a number of different kind of posts. Text, quote, and photo (where you find those lovely picture and .gif sets), are the most beloved, while link, audio, video, and chat are the B team. Sure, they can be fun from time to time but seriously, but everybody knows that they’re not who the audience is really here for. Every Tumblr user has an Ask box in which any other Tumblr user (and anonymous folks, if they’ve got it turned on) can submit questions or messages. Ask posts are generated when a Tumblr user decides to publicly publish their response to one of those messages on their blog.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, right?

Except Asks weren’t rebloggable like every other kind of post.

I know. Why?

Nobody knows. Users developed several work arounds, like taking a screenshot of the ask post on the dashboard, posting it as an image post, and tagging it with the original author. Alternatively, some folks would copy the text of both the question and the answer into a new text post. Or, waiting for some one else to do it and for the original author to reblog that, so that proper credit could be given.

Or, nicely asking the OP to make it rebloggable themselves and hoping that they would.

And while Tumblr rolled out feature updates like better mobile apps, fanmail, moving the reblog buttons, and adding an activity monitoring tab in the sidebar, rebloggable Asks remained one of the most, well, asked for but never delivered features on the site.

At least, until today, when Asks started showing up in a smart new interface that included, to the joy of Tumblr users, a functional reblog button. Allow me to simulate that joy now:

This has been your Tumblr simulation of the day. Thank you for reading.