Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
What time zone is used?
Your local timezone (as reported by your browser) is used for all time inputs and outputs, including the analysis graph.
Does this service meet Reddit Code of Conduct?
I’ve registered it with reddit and talked to their API contact regarding commercial use, they said it was fine. But you can totally use the tool to get yourself banned if you try.
If you’re worried, brush up on your Reddiquette. Here are a few relevant points:
Read the rules of a community before making a submission. These are usually found in the sidebar.
Search for duplicates before posting. Redundant posts add nothing new to previous conversations. That said, sometimes bad timing, a bad title, or just plain bad luck can cause an interesting story to fail to get noticed. Feel free to post something again if you feel that the earlier posting didn’t get the attention it deserved and you think you can do better.
Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that’s all you ever post, or it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content.
How do multiple reddit accounts work?
Paid users can add multiple reddit users to post with. Here are a few details about that:
- You can add as many reddit users to your account as you want.
- All posts by any user on your account will count against the same total for billing purposes.
- You can add a single reddit user to multiple Later for Reddit accounts; however, you will only be able to sign into your Later for Reddit account with a user if it is the first time said user has been linked to any account in Later for Reddit.
Are you affiliated with Instagram scheduling service Later.com?
Later for Reddit has no affiliation with Later.com.
Scheduling Posts
Why can I only schedule 5 posts per month?
This policy has been in place since well before I started charging for the service (although it used to be 1 post per week); it’s mostly an attempt to keep traffic sustainable. Reddit imposes rate limits on API usage, and if I offered unlimited posting to everyone it could become difficult to support, especially since there would be a ton of competition for the most popular times.
Can I schedule several posts at the same time?
All limits apply to the time that the post is due to appear on reddit. You can create as many posts as you like at once as long as you have no more scheduled per calendar month than your plan allows.
Where do uploaded images go?
You can choose from 3 options for uploaded images:
- Upload to Imgur
- Upload to i.l4r.io
- Upload to Reddit
Imgur uploads are uploaded in “hidden” mode, meaning they won’t appear on any of imgur’s pages and are accessible only via their URL. Images uploaded this way cannot be deleted, so be aware!
If you want more control over your images, you can create an imgur.com account of your own, use the
lr4.io option, or use another image host. Just pop the image URL into the Link field when adding
your Content and you’ll be good to go!
Images to be uploaded to Reddit are first uploaded to i.l4r.io, and can be managed from laterforreddit.com as usual. When the post is submitted to reddit, the image will be uploaded to Reddit’s image host.
What’s up with Imgur banning NSFW images?
Effective May 16, 2023, Imgur will no longer allow NSFW content and will begin deleting anonymously-uploaded content. This will of course cause issues for imgur uploads from L4R.
We have implemented a new image host at i.l4r.io to help ameliorate this for our users. It is currently available for all paid users, and you can read all about it here: l4r.io Image Hosting.
Why aren’t image uploads available to free users?
We didn’t allow imgur.com uploads for free users because I was using imgur’s commercial API, which charges for traffic after a certain point.
We certainly are not allowing free users to upload to l4r.io, this time for two main reasons:
- There are certain images that are seriously illegal, and for good reason. Harder to use L4R to host those if you have to provide a credit card.
- I’m not 100% sure how much hosting and serving the images is gonna cost.
It’s possible that image hosting will be opened up in the future once we’ve tested the waters first.
Why did my submission fail to post?
The most common reasons this happens are:
- Your account is too young and a captcha is still required to post
- Some sort of automatic moderation removed your post immediately
- You tried to submit an image post to a text-only subreddit
Under the Posts tab on the dashboard, each completed post has a “Show Logs” button under it – check there to see the response that Reddit gave to the post request.
Failing any of those, it could be that something failed on our end. Let me know about it so I can fix it!
What is rate-limiting, and how does Later for Reddit deal with it?
See also: All About Ratelimits
Reddit applies rate-limiting rules to all posts, preventing users from posting too many times in a given time frame (the exact numbers for which users and what time frame vary according to some proprietary logic). You may have encountered this error with a message such as: “you are doing that too much. try again in 9 minutes”.
Later for Reddit will automatically handle rate-limiting for you. Here’s how:
- Each post goes into a separate per-reddit-user logical queue, to be posted one-at-a-time
- When a post attempt fails due to a rate limit error, the queue is paused for the requested time
- After the time has elapsed, the first post in the queue is attempted, and posting goes on as usual (until another rate-limit response is encountered)
For this reason, you may find that posts you schedule for the same instant may in fact be posted over a short time after that instant.
Bulk Post Uploads
See also: Using the Bulk Upload tool
My upload seems to load for a long time, then fails with no error. What’s going on?
At the moment the bulk upload attempts to complete in a single web request, which can time out if creating all the posts takes too long (in this case, no posts are created, to avoid making a big mess). From your end, what this looks like is the upload proceeding for about a minute, and then failing with an indistinct (or no) error.
This can happen to any upload, but for the most part, creating posts is fast enough not to be a problem. The main thing that can slow this down is applying the post strategy. This is because, as part of the “best time” calculation, it has to fetch a bunch of posts from the selected subreddit, which can take some time (especially if reddit is having a slow day). It’s not a big deal to do this a few times, but if it’s trying to figure out the best time to post on 100 different subreddits, you might run into this issue.
There are two main ways around it:
- Avoid using the Post Strategy field too heavily, or
- Split the spreadsheet up into a few, smaller ones.
Post Time Analysis
How does the Analysis page work?
The magic API gremlins find all the posts during the current month (because that’s how it works), pick the top 1000 sorted by upvotes, and assemble some pretty charts for you.
What does the “threshold” field mean on the Analysis page?
Ideally you want plots of when popular posts are posted, not just any post. The threshold controls how many votes a post has to have to be counted. The analysis picks the posts from the top 1000 that exceed this threshold.
So, a setting of 0 is probably fine for large subreddits, where none of the top 1000 posts in the last month are likely to be at that level. On the other hand, smaller subreddits might have less than 1000 posts that are really front-page. Say you have a really inactive sub with one post at 5 points, one at 3 points, a few at 2 points, and then the other 995 posts in the analysis as 0 or 1 posts. The other 995 probably aren’t exceptional successes here and should probably be ignored – that’s what the threshold setting is for.
A good rule of thumb for the threshold is, how many votes would a post in this subreddit have to get to have done “well” (i.e. to hit the front page). 5 is just sort of an arbitrary number a bit more than 1 to chop off the tail of a wide range of subreddit vote profiles without interfering too much.
0 will consider a post with 0 votes to have done just fine and count it. This is likely not what you want. (Also, the server is then forced to look through 10 pages of results when it could have stopped earlier.)