Gifs freeze in gifsets for no reason: the ongoing saga
starberry-cupcake
Have you noticed lately, in your dashboard or when you visit someone’s blog, in your mobile/s or your computer/s, that there’s one gif not moving in a gifset? Normally just one, maybe sometimes more? Most frequently with gifsets that aren’t new, maybe months or years old? Perhaps you did and thought it was just you, your internet connection or that the person who originally uploaded it wasn’t careful with the sizes. I’m here to tell you it’s probably not that.
I started noticing this over a month ago. I came across one of my older gifsets and one of the gifs wasn’t moving properly. I thought I had, for some reason, messed up the sizes, so I made it again, re-uploaded it and it got fixed. All was well, until I realized that it was happening with more of my gifsets, some of which I had their respective files still saved in my computer. When I re-uploaded the same exact gif as it was originally uploaded, it got fixed. When I tried downloading the one which didn’t move and compare it to either the original or another one, which was moving, from the same gifset, the one not moving seemed like a still image in photoshop, without the frames and with a different size than it originally had. I started fearing there was a glitch or something ruining my gifs and I was going to have to replace each one manually for them to work properly again.
So I gave up trying to figure it out and mailed the Staff. I sent them the link to my post and a copy of the gif I had originally uploaded, so they could see it wasn’t the size. Their response was that they saw the gifset perfectly, that I must have been the one with the problem (!!!!). They gave me the normal instructions (check all your extensions, update your Chrome, restart your computer) but nothing worked. And I knew it wasn’t going to anyway, because my sister, who also uses tumblr, had seen this happen in other gifsets from other people as well.
Feeling like the lead in a horror flick of the early 2000s when they know the house is haunted but people around them insist they just need some sleep, I decided to get some back up and asked people about it, in and out of tumblr. I sent the link out in social media to know what others saw in the same gifset. Out of 13 people who responded to me that same day, only 2 people saw it perfectly. The other 11 saw one gif not moving, some saw the same one I did and others saw another gif not moving, but there was always at least one. This was not my problem for sure.
I sent this to the Staff with gif screencaps of what I saw in my blog, my dash and the pop-up sidebar on my dash (because the gifs not moving change in one or the others sometimes). And then asked my brother about it. He said it was probably how Tumblr is handling proxy so we used a proxy site to change different servers to the link. Lo and behold, in a European server, for example, the gifset moved perfectly, but in a US one, one of the gifs didn’t move, however, it wasn’t the same one I saw not moving from Argentina, it was another one. Whatever is happening, there’s where the issue lies.
Basically, it’s not me. Or you, if this has happened to you. And your gifs aren’t ruined or not properly sized or have a glitch. As of today, the last message I got from the Staff was that they were working on it and passing it to the appropriate people to handle, so we’ll have to wait patiently until it’s solved. I’m leaving it be and it’s in their hands now, but at least I have a vague idea of where the problem lies. So if this is something you have experienced in the past months, now you know why it might be happening. For some reason, I haven’t seen many posts about this, maybe people thought it was their internet connection or their extensions or that OPs messed up sizes and kept scrolling without paying it any mind. Maybe I missed a huge post about it and what I’m saying isn’t news to anyone. Still, I thought it was appropriate to let you know.
Whenever I get a message from the Staff, I’ll update this post.