Scheduling and publishing
Publishing health and failed posts
PlanSend checks for due posts every minute and publishes them. When something goes wrong it retries the failures worth retrying, and tells you plainly about the ones that are not.
How a post is published
Every minute, PlanSend looks for posts whose time has come and creates one publishing job per channel. Each job talks to that network, records the result, and stores the live URL of the published post. Each job carries a unique key per attempt, so a retry can never publish the same thing twice.
The health page
Open Publishing health in the sidebar. It shows four counts — Pending, Running, Succeeded and Failed — a badge reading Systems healthy or Action needed, and the last 100 attempts with the post, the channel, when it ran, how many attempts it took, and the result. Successful rows link out to the live post.
When something fails
Failures fall into three groups.
- Temporary — the network was slow, unreachable or rate-limiting. PlanSend retries after about 1 minute, then 5, then 30. If the third retry fails, the post is marked failed.
- Permanent — an expired connection, a missing permission, or content the network refuses. There is no retry, because the same attempt would fail again. Fix the cause, then schedule the post again.
- Unclear — PlanSend sent the post but never learned the outcome. The row reads Check network first and no retry button is offered. Open the account, see whether the post is there, and then either retry or cancel.
Retrying
A confirmed failure shows Retry on the health page and Retry publish on the post. It queues the post again for the next run, usually within a minute. The approved revision is kept, so no new review is needed. If you edited the post after it failed, schedule the current revision instead of retrying the old one.
What you are told
When a post ends in failure, every owner of the brand gets one email with the post, the channel, the reason in plain language and a link to the post, plus an entry in Notifications. Retries are silent; only the final outcome is reported.
The most common causes
- The channel's connection expired. Reconnect it and schedule again — see Troubleshooting.
- Instagram refused the image ratio. Crop it and try again; see Images and video.
- The network is rate-limiting the account. The retries usually clear this on their own.
Common questions
- How many times does PlanSend retry?
- Up to three times for temporary problems, after about 1 minute, 5 minutes and 30 minutes. After that the post is marked failed and you are emailed. Problems that cannot be fixed by retrying, such as an expired token or text over a network's limit, fail on the first attempt.
- What does "check network first" mean?
- The network may already have published the post — the connection dropped after PlanSend sent it but before it got an answer. PlanSend will not retry, because that could publish twice. Look at the account, then either retry or leave it.
- Do I need a new approval after fixing a failed post?
- No. The approved revision is kept, so you can schedule it again from the post page without going back to your client.
Still stuck? Email [email protected].