Publication queue

The publication queue stores your offers and sends them to Telegram on its own, spaced out and on the schedule you decide.

10 minute read

On this page
From Solo

The essentials

  1. In Create offer, prepare the offer and press Queue.
  2. Here, in the Publishing card, tick Active.
  3. In Frequency, type how many minutes pass between messages.
  4. In Resting hours, press the hours when you do not want it to publish.
  5. Press Save, in the screen's header.

Each channel has its own queue

The screen shows the queue of the active channel, with its own pace and its own schedule. A message you send to several channels at once enters each one's queue separately.

The free plan publishes by hand

The scheduled queue comes with the Solo plan. On the free plan the screen is shown whole, with the status fixed on Paused and a notice at the top: “Your plan publishes by hand. For the queue to send on its own, at its pace and on its schedule, upgrade your plan.”. The rest works: you can save messages, change the frequency and the hours, and Publish now still sends.

  1. Publishing: the status, Active or Paused, and the Frequency.
  2. Resting hours: press an hour to pause or activate publishing in it.
  3. Schedule: the messages by day, with the time each one goes out.
  4. The search box, Empty the queue and Create offer.
  5. Save, which lights up as soon as you change something in the Publishing card.

The first time you open the Publication queue, a guided tour points out its parts. You can skip it, and start it again whenever you like from the button in the header, with Repeat the tour.

How it works

  1. You prepare the offer in Create offer and press Queue: the message is stored, waiting.
  2. A process checks the queue every minute. To send a channel's next message it checks that the queue is Active, that the current hour is not a resting one and that the frequency has passed since the last publication in that channel. It sends one message per channel per minute at most.
  3. The message goes out to Telegram, with the channel's template and image, and leaves the queue. It is noted in Published posts.

In addition to Create offer, messages enter the queue with Queue from the manual handling of a search profile and from the Telegram bot.

The order is the order of entry and it cannot be changed from the screen. What you can do is Publish now the one you do not want to wait.

An example, with the queue every 60 minutes: if a message goes out at 10:00, the next one goes out around 11:00. If at 10:20 you publish another offer with Publish from Create offer, the 11:00 one does not move. And if 11:00 falls in a resting hour, it goes out in the first minute the queue publishes again.

Fine print: what moves the frequency and what does not

The frequency is counted from the last publication in that channel made by one of these three:

  • the queue itself;
  • automatic publishing;
  • the Publish now of a search profile.

They do not move it: the Publish of Create offer or of manual handling, or the Publish now of this list: you can publish by hand between two scheduled messages without altering their time.

Publishing

The settings are in the Publishing card, at the very top. On a phone it arrives folded: press its header to open it. On the plans with a cap of publications per month, that header says how many you have used (“120 of 300 publications this month”), folded as well.

Changes are not saved on their own: they are saved with the Save button in the screen's header, which switches on as soon as anything differs from what is saved. Until you press it, the card carries the Unsaved chip, and if you try to leave, the application asks you. If somebody else in the organization has saved the same thing while you had the screen open, the save is rejected and asks you to reload, instead of overwriting their changes.

A new channel starts with the queue Paused, every 30 minutes and with no resting hours, unless when creating it you choose Copy settings from another channel: then it inherits that channel's state, frequency and hours.

Status

  • Active: the queue publishes messages according to the schedule.
  • Paused: nothing goes out. Messages stay stored and are not lost, and the list stops giving departure times until you switch it on again.

Frequency

The time it waits between one send and the next, in minutes: type the number in the Every … minutes field, between 1 and 1440 (one day).

Under the field, a line says how many messages a day that pace allows with the resting hours you have set.

Each plan has a minimum for the active queue: Solo every 60 minutes, Creador every 30 and Agencia every 10. If you type a shorter frequency, that same line says so right away (“Your plan publishes at most once every 60 minutes”), and if you save the active queue like that, it is rejected and tells you your plan's minimum.

Fine print: the minimum and the messages a day
  • With the queue paused you can save any value; the notice will come the day you activate it.
  • When a frequency that is too short is rejected, the notice also says, if there is one, which plan allows publishing more often.
  • The count of messages a day leaves half a minute of margin between sends: “every 30 minutes” comes out as 47 a day, not 48.

Resting hours

Press an hour of the bar to make it rest and press it again to make it publish:

  • Publishing (in blue): it can send messages during that hour.
  • Resting (in grey): nothing is published during that hour.

The hours are in the organization's time zone, with the clock change included.

Pressing an hour so the queue rests in it
Fine print: the region's clock

The numbers are written on the clock of your organization's region: where AM/PM is used you will see “3” where another region sees “15”, and the AM or PM mark where each half of the day begins. When you hover over an hour, it says the exact stretch (“7:00 - 7:59”).

The schedule

The list is a schedule: messages are grouped by the day they go out, and each row carries the time its turn comes, worked out from the channel's frequency and resting hours. The first time, in blue, is the one of the message that goes out next.

Where the queue rests between two messages —the night, nearly always— a grey band says so: “The queue rests from 0:00 to 8:00”. And under the name Schedule a line says how far ahead there is something to publish (“Queued up until tomorrow at 13:00”).

With the queue paused there are no days or times: each row shows a dash and “paused”, the order is still the same, and the line above says the messages are waiting for you to switch the queue on again. If you leave it active but with all 24 hours resting, the same happens, with “resting”, and the line above says that every hour of the day is set to rest.

Search and turn pages

The Search the queue… field filters the rows by any text they contain: the title, the store, the price or the time.

When the queue does not fit on one page, the pagination at the foot shows 50 rows, and you can choose 25, 100 or 200.

Selecting messages

Press a row to select it, or bring focus to it with the Tab key and press Enter or the space bar. You can select several rows to act on them at once; the store link opens the product without marking the row.

When you mark the first row a bar appears at the bottom with the actions and how many messages you have marked, with an × to undo the selection. The selection is kept even if you search or change page: the marked messages you can no longer see still count.

Available actions

Button Selection What it does
Publish now One or more rows Sends the selected messages to Telegram immediately, after confirmation.
Edit One row only Opens Create offer with the message's data. Save updates it and takes you back to the queue.
Delete One or more rows Removes the selected messages, after confirmation.
Empty the queue None Removes all the messages in the active channel's queue at once, after confirmation, which says the channel and how many there are. The queues of your other channels are not touched.

Publish now, Delete and Empty the queue reload the page when they finish, with a notice of what has happened (“3 messages published”); the search and the page you were on are lost.

Publish now

It counts as one of the month's publications, and does not wait for the frequency or respect the resting hours. If Telegram does not accept it —the bot can no longer publish in the channel, the token is not valid or Telegram is not answering—, the queue tells you why in red and the message stays where it was. If only some of several go out, it tells you how many and why not the rest. With the month's publications used up, it sends nothing.

Messages that cannot be published

If a message saved in the queue no longer meets the rules of an offer —for example, its price is 0 or the list price is lower than the price—, it appears at the top of the list, under Cannot be published, with the reason under the title and no time. Sending skips it and the rest of the queue goes on going out at its time. It is never deleted on its own.

A message that Telegram rejects, or that we cannot prepare, several times while the rest of the queue keeps going out ends up there too: for example, because its image can no longer be downloaded. The reason says what to check.

Select it and press Edit to correct it: the form opens it as it is saved, with the failing field marked in red and the reason underneath. When you save it corrected, it goes back into the schedule in its place and goes out at its time. If you would rather remove it, press Delete. Publish now on one of these counts it as failed, with the rule it breaks as the reason.

When the queue cannot send

Four things stop the queue even while it is active, and when one of them happens the screen says so at the very top, with the link to where it is fixed. If there is more than one, it names the first one to sort out:

  1. The email is unconfirmed: nothing goes out, not even with Publish now, until the owner confirms their email.
  2. Your plan publishes by hand: the free plan does not send from the queue.
  3. The Telegram bot is missing, or Telegram rejects its token: check it in Settings › Telegram. If you cannot open that section, the notice tells you that whoever administers the organization fixes it.
  4. The month's publications are used up: the queue keeps whatever you prepare and sends again on the 1st. The notice names the plan that gives more.

While it lasts, the list gives no departure times: each row shows a dash and “waiting”, and the line under Schedule says “The queue cannot send right now”.

There is another case that the screen flags with a notice of its own: if the active channel is missing its ID from Telegram, nothing goes out from its queue until you complete it (Complete channel).

During maintenance the queue stops entirely and, when it ends, resumes at its pace; nothing is lost.

If Telegram rejects a message

When the bot can no longer publish in the channel —it has been removed as an administrator, for example— the message is not lost: it stays in the queue and is retried every minute. The notice appears in Home and in Channels, not on this screen, which goes on giving times as if nothing had happened.

The queue and automatic publishing

Automatic publishing gives way to the queue, at the same pace and in the same hours; Cannot be published messages do not hold it back.

  1. The queue: what you leave in it goes out first, at its pace.
  2. Automatic publishing: it only publishes when the queue has nothing to send.
  3. Resting hours: nothing goes out from either of them.
  4. Between one send and the next, the frequency, also after an automatic one.
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