mylifeasacovergirl:

are you only able to have 20 tracked tags? whenever I track my 21st, the numbers disappear (I don’t see when new posts are tagged) and they come back when I untrack one. 

is this a bug for me or a “feature” for all of tumblr?

It’s not just you.

There’s a maximum of 20 tracked tags in Tumblr’s Dashboard search. It’s an undocumented limit that’s existed for at least two years (when I figured it out, could be longer).

The tough thing about this limit is that you get no error message when you go above 20 tracked tags. Tumblr will keep letting you add tags until… forever. Nothing greys out. No modals pop-up. The symptom of the limit is that no “new posts” alerts/messages ever pop up next to your tracked tags.

It’s not just that the specific number of new posts Tumblr tells you about (“7 news posts” “10 new posts”) ceases to be accurate (many dispute it’s ever accurate). You get no notification at all next to each of your tags. The the tracked words you plug in stay there, but they do nothing. You need to manually visit each of your tags “blindly” to see if there’s new stuff in any of them, because no notifications will show up even in tags that do have new content.

After going beyond 20 for the first time, you may think for days/weeks/months that there just happens to be no new content in Tumblr-land related to your tags… then you start to think that Tumblr tags have stopped working temporarily. Or maybe they’re broken permanently, for your account.

Nope. There’s just a silent limit. No more than 20 tracked tags can work in Tumblr’s Dashboard Search.

*pops Sherlock Holmes pipe in mouth, drops mic”

Next mystery, please.