I’ve run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com.
Actually when Tumblr released the domain to Pitchfork Media, pitchfork.tumblr.com was completely dormant and empty. There were not “several posts,” on that account, there were zero.
Recently, one of my friends who is subscribed to my pitchfork tumblr was surprised to see a sudden change in the content I was posting.
See above.
That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc.
As per our policy, we emailed this account’s address to inquire about the dormant account. After you failed to respond for 72 hours, we released the domain.
No content was deleted and no accounts were suspended.
So we are clear, Tumblr will release dormant domains to trademark holders pursuant to the law, just as all other web services, but never without advanced notice.
…
If there was some kind of content quality threshold that failed to be met which led to my blog’s demise, then 98% of Tumblr should now be blank.
Ha.
TO CLARIFY: While our support team did not go out of its way to notify the registered user as it was an inactive account, our domain release service sends an automated notification email with a link to postpone, 72 hours in advance.
We started this process last week upon our first correspondence with the trademark holder.
