I’ve seen random reports of this for a while, but can’t reproduce it. The code is VERY straight forward and I’ve reviewed it a number of times.
My only theory at this point – with nothing to back it up – is to ask about your posting frequency? Is it daily? Or some number of hours apart?
My theory is that the math of the posting frequency causes it to skip those days. No idea how that works mathematically, but it is possible.
Using this plugin, we can make enough drafts very fast:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/automatic-featured-image-posts/
My exact schedule setting:
Post Randomly:
Surprise me
5 posts per day
Randomly after: 8:00
And before: 23:00
Post Randomly:
Surprise me
5 posts per day
Randomly after: 7:00
And before: 22:30
Starting from 10 February. Actual schedule started from 11, and skipped 20 Feb. 10 remaining Drafts.
4,3 posts/days Same result.
Even with “Post up to”, 10,20,30 days are skipped.
Thanks for the details and the clear steps to reproduce this. I’m starting my testing this morning to try to reproduce this.
Well, that’s odd. I did just duplicate this using your exact method. Skipping the 10th was “normal” as the instructions do say “posts entirely randomly after the date above” – so that’s expected, BUT skipping the 20 & 30 doesn’t make sense at all. I’ll dig and fix this.
I’m having the same problem, never linked it to being the 10th of the month, but very well could have been on the 20th last month that this happen. I see that you updated the plugin today but the issue still exists. Was anything resolved or were you able to duplicate it? I love this plugin and we schedule out all our posts for the morning with it each night.
For me we schedule each night for the next day, select post randomly, post up to 999 and then select the hours from 6am to 9am
I’ve tried it using less than 999 or the exact number and it doesn’t work either way.
I was able to duplicate the original 10/20/30 issue and after applying my fix, it was resolved in my testing.
WorldChris – are you saying the plugin refuses to post the next day on ALL days or only on the 10/20/30? Can you give me the exact settings you use like robotrop did?
The number may be a factor. WordPress can be slow updating posts, and updating 999 of them could be timing out, thus preventing some posts from being updated.
Jeff,
First off thank you for your reply. We use the draft scheduler nightly to schedule 300 drafts from 03:30-08:30 and then some other odd number which changes daily for between 06:00-09:30
When we schedule them we also schedule the date (which is usually the next day as we schedule the evening before) and then select the random option, post exactly 999 and then select the times. The 999 number is just to allow for up to the total number of posts daily for the day.
We’ve been doing this successfully since mid November but there have been a few times where it just didn’t work and I never could figure out why because the next day it would. It was just by chance that I saw someone else post their problem about the 10th date.
Last night it failed no matter how I tried it, I even entered the exact number of posts, which was only 94 at the time, and they all remained in the draft status. I uninstalled the plugin and then downloaded your update for 1.9.1 and still had the same issue of not being able to schedule on the 10th.
I don’t know what help that does, however I can tell you I tried ever combination of number of posts, up to posts, times etc and could never get them to be scheduled for today.
I’m going to look through my emails and see if I can figure out other days it was that we had issues and if it was on the 10, 20th or 30th of the months.
thanks again and look forward to anything you come up with, or let me know if you need me to test or try anything else.
Glad I could help.
worldchris you updated to 1.9.1? From where?
I don’t see any update prompt. I even searched the web for it.
I uploaded 1.9.1 but the repo hasn’t updated it yet. I think I did something wrong. I’ll take a look at it later today.
@robotrop
I went to the plugin page and downloaded it from there and then installed it manually into wordpress by ftp. However it still didn’t resolve the issue. I know what I installed was 1.9.1 because the folder was/is (I’m looking at the download now) draft-scheduler.1.9.1.zip unless that’s truly not 1.9.1 which would explain why I still had the issues.
Jeff can you confirm/deny that the file that I just downloaded is or isn’t infact the correct file?
Thanks again
Chris
If you downloaded it from WordPress.org, it should be the correct file.
Since the plugin uses a random number generator, some days may not get posts, but in my testing, it wasn’t “always” any particular day. I’m going to have to see how I can debug this for you, since the update seemed to make the problem go away for me.
Hi Jeff,
It just did it to me again for today and note today is the 20th, so it still doesn’t work on the 10th or 20th
This was done last night to schedule drafts for this morning:
Selected the 20th on the calendar
Post Randomly
Post up to 300 per day
times 330am – 830am
Goes through it’s paces and then doesn’t schedule. Note that I do have the 1.9.1 installed, or what appears to be based on my download folder.
Thanks
Also note that I just deleted it from wordpress and went to install it again but the plugin still states that only 1.9 is available online?
Thanks for the update.
I’m going to try to bump the version and make sure you have the correct code.
The plugin simply says “Starting on this date and moving 1 day at a time, schedule some number of posts” – there’s nothing in there that would cause this degree of simple skipping.
