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How publishing works

Behind every scheduled and published post is a durable publishing engine. It waits for the scheduled moment, delivers the post to each platform, retries transient problems, and gives up fast on permanent ones — all without you keeping the app open. This page explains what happens after you hit schedule.

Scheduled delivery is durable

When you schedule a post, Buzzator starts a durable workflow for it. The workflow sleeps until the scheduled time and then publishes the post. Because the wait is durable, it survives restarts and outages on our side — closing your browser (or a server hiccup) doesn't cancel the delivery. When the time comes, the post is sent and its result is recorded.

Each platform has its own lane

Delivery is routed to a per-platform queue — Instagram posts go through the Instagram lane, LinkedIn posts through the LinkedIn lane, and so on. This isolation means one network's outage can't stall the others: if Instagram is down, your LinkedIn and X posts still go out on time.

Outcomes

When the engine publishes a post, it lands in one of three states, and the result is logged to the post's activity:

Outcome Meaning
Published Delivered successfully.
Partial A multi-target post (e.g. a thread or carousel) where some parts went live and some didn't.
Failed Delivery didn't succeed.

Retries and fast failures

Not every failure is worth retrying, so the engine tells the two apart:

  • Transient problems — a network blip, a temporary platform error, a momentary rate limit — are retried automatically with backoff (a few attempts, waiting longer between each).
  • Permanent problems — a disconnected or expired account, no connected account for that platform, or a hard rate-limit — fail fast instead of burning retries on something that can't succeed until you fix it.

Down workers fail in minutes, not forever

If the workers for a platform are down (or misconfigured) so that nothing is processing its queue, a post waiting on that queue fails within a few minutes rather than hanging indefinitely. You'll see it as failed and can retry once the platform is healthy again.

Manual publish actions

From a post's Detail Panel you have three manual controls:

Action What it does Who
Publish Now Skips the scheduled wait and publishes immediately. Eligible from draft, scheduled, or failed states (among others). Anyone with schedule permission
Retry Re-queues a failed publish (or one stuck publishing long enough to be considered orphaned). Anyone with schedule permission
Mark as Published Reconciles a post to Published without re-sending it — for when the content actually went live on the platform but the status didn't catch up (e.g. a publishing, failed, or partial post you've verified). Owners and admins only

Mark as Published does not re-publish

It only corrects Buzzator's record to match reality. Use it after you've confirmed on the platform that the content is live — it won't post anything a second time.

Double-publish safety

The engine guards against publishing the same post twice. A claim is taken before the platform call, so a second attempt can't also publish — and a double-click on Publish Now is simply rejected (the post is already being published) rather than sending twice.

Rescheduling replaces the pending delivery: the in-flight wait is cancelled and a fresh one starts for the new time, so a post is never delivered on both the old and new schedules.