Skip to Content

Tumblr Porn Blogs with “Hidden” Spam

I use my phone a lot to browse Reddit, and sometimes I click a link to a Tumblr blog and get redirected to an ad site.

Then I wonder, Why hasn’t the post been removed as spam? The answer, after some investigation, is that the blog only redirects on mobile devices. People on desktop and laptop computers have no idea.

To find out if a blog is doing this, you can view the source code for the page. (How to do this depends on the browser you’re using.) Near the beginning, you’ll find code that looks like this:

<script src="http://static.dudamobile.com/DM_redirect.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
   DM_redirect("http://somesite.example.com");
</script>

To make this easy, you can search for “DM_redirect”. Basically, what this does is check if the user is using a mobile browser and redirect to “somesite.example.com” if they are. This site is the ad site.

This is against Tumblr’s Community Guidelines. The Community Guidelines forbid spam, which includes “dubious code in your posts, like using JavaScript to cause redirects or inject unwanted ads.” (Okay, I know it says “posts,” but I think the spirit applies to code in the blog itself.)

If you find one of these blogs, report it! To do this, search for the blog name. When the blog comes up, click the person icon in the upper right and then “Flag this blog.” Report the blog as spam, because that’s what it is.