About the Scheduler
There were a few comments yesterday mentioning that the scheduler wasn't working so I did a series of tests last night and found that the scheduler is indeed working. I think there is a general misunderstanding on how the scheduler works and that is mostly my fault for not explaining it well enough and for not supplying a FAQ with a thorough explanation.
You must set the scheduler to post an hour early. In other words if you want the scheduler to post at 8:00 you must set the scheduled time for 7:00. Our scheduler is not accurate to the minute, and the reason why is it is triggered by a small program called Cron. Cron runs automatically at least once every hour and it detects any scheduled events that have been set to go off at a certain time. So, if you set the scheduled time for 7:00 it will not post the essay until the Cron program runs sometime within the next hour. For example, here are the results from the 3 tests I performed last night:
Test 1 -- was scheduled for 8:00--published at 8:20
Test 2 -- was scheduled for 9:00--published at 9:25
Test 3 -- was scheduled for 10:00--published at 10:30
So you can see that the actual publishing time will vary and is unpredictable, but it will definitely post within an hour of the time that was set.
If you look for your essay to post exactly at the time you set, you wont see it and that could lead you to think that the scheduler isn't working. Set the scheduler an hour early and feel confident that it will publish sometime within the following hour.
Sorry for any inconveniences or misunderstanding and I hope this explains the situation well enough. If you have any questions about the scheduler or any questions about the site in general, please ask in the comments. Thank you.
Comments
thanks, JtC, that was a great explanation and makes
totally sense now. I remember back then I realized that too and was confused.
Hope you are well and got enough rest. Have a very good day.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Thanks for the kind thoughts, mimi...
I have a short work day today and should be available to answer any questions if anyone has any.
JtC, question
It appeared that the scheduler dropped my Open Thread on Wednesday. I guess it is possible that I forgot to schedule it, but I always fill in the scheduler and the tags first when I compose a new thread. With my Wednesday thread, I went to edit it and looked at my threads that were supposed to be scheduled and it was not there. I did find it, but if I had not gone to edit it, I would not have known that it was missing from the scheduler. Has anyone else experienced this or did I have a senior moment brain fart?
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
I'm not sure, gg...
It's always worked reliably when I've tried it, so it may be that you did forget to schedule it, especially since you looked for it and it wasn't in your schedule queue. I do stuff like that all the time too. One other thing it could have been also, sometimes I'll check the scheduled essays in the morning for the person who has the Open Thread for that day and if they have the OT scheduled I'll run Cron manually to publish it. I'm not saying that that's what happened in your case, but I may have manually published your OT and you checked right afterwards and it was gone because I had already manually ran Cron.
I bet that explains it
because when I went to edit it, it was shortly before it was supposed to publish. Thank you for your response and explanation.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Thank you JtC, it was us that were not working,
I'll schedule 4 hours ahead because I'm on PDT.
BTW it RAINED last night and this morning!!
To thine own self be true.
No need to...
schedule 4 hours ahead, Marilyn. You'll need your Morning Greens/Open Thread to publish at 6:00 AM Pacific, so if you set the scheduler for 5:00 AM Pacific then you'll be fine. The time function on the scheduler represents your local time. But of course you can schedule 4 hours in advance if you want to.
Glad to hear you got some rain!! Woohoo!!
Yaay, I didn't break it!
I think I understand it better now. My initial interpretation was that you had to set the publish time at least one hour from the time that you accessed the scheduler, if that makes any sense. Thanks for explaining it JtC, I think I get it now.
All I want is the truth. Just give me some truth. John Lennon
Yeah, I agree...
the short directions I added to the scheduler dialogue box is confusing, I didn't want a long explanation cluttering up the posting area so I wrote that short blurb that is probably only understandable by me. I need to rewrite it. Thanks burnt out.