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Working through the publishing queue

Reading the real state of every scheduled, in-flight, published and failed post, what retrying does, and which networks can actually receive a post today.

Updated

The publishing queue shows every publishing job with its true status, the provider it was sent to, how many attempts it has taken and the exact error the last one produced. Nothing is marked published unless the network returned a live post.

Failed jobs can be retried. Queued jobs can be cancelled. A job that has started publishing can be neither, and the queue says which of those applies rather than showing a button that fails.

One thing to understand before you plan around this page: only one network can actually receive a post today. Bluesky is live. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Google Business Profile all sit behind provider app review or production credentials that have not been granted, so a post scheduled to any of them fails once, permanently, with the error connector_not_production_ready. That is not a fault in your setup and no setting changes it.

BEFORE YOU START

  • Active membership of the organisation to read the queue.
  • The "publish" permission to retry or cancel.
  • A connected account in a healthy state. A connection that is expired, disabled or awaiting reconnection refuses at scheduling time.

STEPS

  1. Open Publishing, or go to /app/publishing for your organisation.
  2. Read the table. Each row gives the destination, the status, the scheduled time, the attempt count and the error if there is one.
  3. For a failed job, choose Retry. The job returns to the queue, its error is cleared and it is attempted again.
  4. For a job still queued, choose Cancel. Cancelling is not reversible.
  5. Where no action is offered, read the reason in the row. It names the state that removed it.
  6. Follow the connectors link to check an account that keeps failing.

WHAT YOU SHOULD SEE

Confirmation that the post was re-queued or cancelled, and the row updating to match. A published row carries a link to the live post.

WHAT THIS WILL NOT DO

  • It will not take a live post down. "Already published. Nothing here takes a live post back down."
  • It will not cancel a post that has started. "Being sent to the provider now - a post cannot be cancelled once publishing has started."
  • It will not undo a cancellation. "Cancelled - this job will not run, and cancelling is not reversible."
  • It will not publish immediately from the web. That control exists in the mobile app only.
  • It will not retry a permanent failure into a success. Retrying a job that failed for a reason that cannot change simply fails the same way again.

WORTH KNOWING

Behind the queue, a job that fails for a transient reason is retried automatically up to five attempts, waiting thirty seconds, then two minutes, five minutes and fifteen minutes between them. Only two errors are treated as transient: the connector being temporarily unavailable, and a general publish failure. Everything else is terminal on the first attempt and is never retried, including a network that is not production ready, an unapproved variant, a connection belonging to a different workspace and every media problem.

IF IT DOES NOT WORK

  • "Only approved content can be published." means the content has not been approved.
  • "This connection is not ready to publish (expired). Reconnect the account and try again." names the connection's real state. Only a connected or expiring connection may publish.
  • "That connection belongs to a different workspace than this content." means the two do not match.
  • "This connection cannot publish media." and "The attached media cannot be published here: ..." are media refusals.
  • "Only a scheduled post that has not started publishing can be cancelled." is the cancel refusal.
  • "Nothing queued yet - approve content and publish it from a connected account." is the empty state.
  • "The retry could not be started. Please try again." and "This post could not be cancelled." are the fallbacks when the server gave no message.
  • A failure message ending "and nothing about it has changed" means the request did not reach the server. The post is exactly as it was.

COMMON QUESTIONS

Why does a post to Instagram fail immediately?

Because that connector is not cleared for production. The error is honest about it, and it is not retried, because retrying cannot help.

What does the attempt count mean?

How many times the job has been picked up. A job that exhausted its automatic retries shows five.

Can I publish something right now?

From the mobile app, yes. The web queue offers retry and cancel only.

  • Using the calendar

    Reading and rearranging everything scheduled across an organisation, what can and cannot be moved, and the reason each blocked item gives.

  • Connecting your channels

    What the Connections page shows, which networks can publish today, and what the account health states mean.

  • Reviewing and deciding on content

    Working the approvals queue, what "edited since submitted" means for your decision, and the separation-of-duties rule that stops an author approving their own work.