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Scheduled Posts not working

  1. osmith215
    Member

    The last four or five posts that I have scheduled on my wordpress.com blog have failed to publish. When I return to the dashboard after the time they are set to be published at they’re still showing as being scheduled for a time that is now in the past.

    All the posts with which I have had problems have been scheduled through the main dashboard from my PC and have been scheduled to publish no less than 2 hours later and up to as much as 48 hours later.

    Does anyone know why this is happening or what can be done to sort it?

    The blog I need help with is scotslaw.wordpress.com.

  2. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    Specifically, which blog did this happen on?

  3. osmith215
    Member

    http://scotslaw.wordpress.com

  4. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    Scheduled posts don't actually appear until someone visits the blog after the scheduled time of publication.

    So, if you schedule a post at 9am, it won't publish until 9:15am if there are no visitors between 9am and 9:15am.

    Basically, the post is published upon visit and back-dated to the schedule time.

  5. osmith215
    Member

    That's interesting because in order to get to the dashboard of wordpress I was going in through the blog (i.e. first visiting the main page of the blog) and the posts were missing.

  6. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    Hm, that is interesting.

    The next time that happens, can you try visiting the blog while logged out first?

  7. osmith215
    Member

    I was just about to post something when you responded last time so instead of posting it immediatley I scheduled it to be posted half an hour later. I logged out and went back to check after the scheduled post time and it wasn't displaying the post.

  8. osmith215
    Member

    I've had people go to the site from other computers just to check it's nothing to do with my PC, but none of them can see the new post and it's still showing as "Scheduled" on the dashboard

  9. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    In that case, please contact us via http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/ and file a private request (if the option presents itself) so we can dig deeper.

  10. justjennifer
    Member

    That was certainly an enlightening revelation. I learn something new every day.

    @macmanx-What happens to any email or the RSS feed? Are they only then pushed out to subscribers as well?

  11. osmith215
    Member

    The post finally went up more than an hour after it was scheduled to

  12. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    justjennifer, that's correct. The only way to publish a post on schedule without an action trigger (like a visit) would be to run an active cron job on all 19 million blogs every minute, which would translate into either constantly crashing servers or no more free blogs.

  13. justjennifer
    Member

    Hm...would "publicize" also act as a action trigger to publish the post at the correct time or only an actual visit?

  14. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    That would be same problem as subscriptions. The post needs to publish before it's publicized, and a scheduled post needs an action trigger to publish.

    Most scheduled post blogs tend to have a multitude of visitors, so in most cases it's not long before someone triggers the post, and we have found that to be the most consistent and reliable method.

    This limitation is also part of the core WordPress software.

  15. justjennifer
    Member

    Guess I need to go write an ode to my readers. :)

    Thanks for the explanations and sorry osmith215 for co-opting your thread.

  16. raincoaster
    Member

    Very, very interesting information.

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