How to get Tumblr working again for embedded IE browsers

Some of you may have noticed over the past couple weeks that Tumblr is not working inside of webDOM. You may have also noticed that Tumblr has stopped working in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. Whenever you click on a link to go to your dashboard or another page, all of the sudden webDOM crashes.

The first thing you need to verify is that you're using Windows 7. There is a different fix for WinXP but it includes using a proxy server that can mask the User-Agent string of the browser and will be covered in a different tutorial. The Windows 7 fix includes using Internet explorer 9. If you do not have IE9, download and install it now before continuing. To check your version of internet explorer, open it up, then click on the "Help" button in the toolbar and click "About".

After you have the proper version of IE for Windows 7, you can follow the next steps to get Tumblr working on your computer:

1. Make sure that webDOM is shut down and that no instances of the program are running
2. Click the Windows Start button
3. Type in "regedit" in the start search bar, then hit enter
4. Click on "Edit" then on "Find"... or just hit "Ctrl + F"
5. Enter into the search box "FEATURE_BROWSER" and hit enter, then wait for the search to find the proper key
6. On the right side, right-click and then under "New" choose, new DWORD. (DWORD is 32-bit)
7. Name the new DWORD "webDOM.exe" capitals matter.
8. Right click on your new DWORD and click "Modify"
9. In the value enter "1F40" (one F four zero) ... that's a hexidecimal value... then hit enter
10. Open webDOM as usual

It's important that you follow these steps exactly as they are written. This means that on step 7 when you are entering webDOM.exe as your new DWORD, you must have "DOM" in capital letters or the fix will not work. This is the same for any application which uses the same method to automate on Tumblr. Just replace "webDOM.exe" with the name of your application.

Tumblr has been working on their new interface and it has caused issues with older versions of internet explorer. However, the fact that you can simply change your user agent to above MSIE 7 or a whole other accepted browser points to a possible "security" based reason to do this. Most automation systems that are running on tumblr use the embedded (ActiveX) version of internet explorer and it seems Tumblr has targeted this directly. Even if internet explorer 9 is installed, the user agent for webDOM will show up as version 7.

Despite their attempts to block out undesirable users by using a generalized filter, Tumblr needs a bit more effort to reach their goal of a "no-automation" social network. Unfortunately they are growing, and we all know that the more things are resisted, the more they persist. They have entered into the never-ending arms race of anti-automation. Surely there will be new limits placed on following, commenting, and the like soon.

Big day for Soundcloud

Yesterday I followed the new strategy on Soundcloud. The results were quite good; My conversion rate from follows/invites to actual profile views went up. My song plays and comments went up as well. This is what I did.

I created two new custom actions in webDOM. One that writes a comment on someone's profile, and the other shares my newest track with any user from my list. I combined these two scripts into a main custom action I called "SuperFollow". I have updated the soundcloud plugin, so for those of you using it, you can enjoy these new features as well. The SuperFollow action only follows a person who has tracks placed on their profile page. If it notices there are tracks, it will also comment on one of the tracks using the message body I have set up in my message settings. If SuperFollow notices that there are no tracks (i.e: a music fan rather than a musician) it then chooses to share a track with that person, just selecting my latest track as the one to share. Since my message is spun using DynamicPhrases, webDOM won't drop the same comment twice, or it will, but very rarely.

I ended up running this on about 2,000 user ID's because I forgot to stop it at 1,000... but no problems, because though it could not follow, it still shared tracks and wrote comments. Here's what I got from yesterday's run so far:

354 profile views
333 plays
62 comments
11 favoritings
4 visits to my site

Now... I took a look at my google analytics for this and I noticed that those 4 visits from yesterday came from my profile page on soundcloud... In total, soundcloud has sent me 36 visits since April 3rd... and on one day it sent me 12. The other 32 visits from them came from the read message page. This allows me to make a couple observations:

1. Soundcloud allows links in messages
2. People respond more to a direct message, though some respond badly if they think it's spam
3. Most people who you do not ask to go to your site will not click your website link on the right side of your profile
4. Commenting and following and sharing tracks really helps the ratio between the number of profile views and the number of plays I'm getting

Also, take into account that this is only one day after my campaign, so there's going to be more people coming in all day as well as over the next few days. The biggest problem is my conversion rate. It seems that I really do have to ask people to come visit my site. So I'm going to wait a day or two, let yesterday's run finish it's job, and then my new policy is going to be dropping links on comments. The links are clickable in comments. It might be a bit shady as far as people seeing it as spam or something, so I'm weary to do it... but hey, one's got to do what one's got to do.

In other news, I was looking at google analytics and my results from last.fm. I'm going to run a last.fm campaign again today and see what I can do as far as that goes. I didn't run much automation on it, and it is up there right after soundcloud in top referrers.

That being said... Facebook remains my top referrer simply due to the viral aspect. The day before yesterday I posted up a new song on my site and shared it on facebook. I got about 180 plays / 112 full plays / 2 downloads. This is pretty good and at least there's people listening and downloading my music. On the 18th though, only about 2 people came from facebook (most of my facebook visitors came from april 3rd to april 12th.) In direct traffic, I had 12 direct visitors on the 18th so it's showing that people are coming back and listening to my music.

It seems I need to make the download aspect a little bit more noticeable or visible. Perhaps I'll make the download button into a gif that slowly pulsates from that dark red color to a yellowish or green color. I'll play with it to see if I can get my download ratio up. Tomorrow we'll see the full aftermath of this. Now it's on to Last.fm for the night.