When is the best time to post on the forum?

[tashirosgt]

The Ubuntu forums have very heavy traffic and, on my browser, a very small default font. So I don't read them like most of the other forums that I visit. In those forums, I can go to my favorite sections and see all the posts for one day on a single page. I can also read the titles of "new posts" on those forums on a single page. On Ubuntu, I'm willing to glance at the first page that comes up, in a section, but I rarely "turn the page".

So I'm wondering if other people browse the forums the same way. (I'm talking about how people browse, not how they search for topics or for their own posts.) If they do, then there might be an optimal time of day and day of the week to post. You would want to post so your thread was on page 1 at a time when the maximum number of potential responders were reading page 1. Has anyone studied this question?

[thisllub]

Yes.
Post now.
Quickly.

[lovinglinux]

I get new posts from my favorite sub-forums using rss feeds. I have already used several rss reader extensions for Firefox and also Liferea, but I'm currently using Google Reader.

I have configured my personal forum settings to subscribe automatically to each thread I reply and when I just want to monitor a new thread I subscribe it manually. So the page I visit the most is http://ubuntuforums.org/usercp.php, which lists all subscribed threads with new messages. I rarely go directly to a sub-forum to browse threads.

When I need to find something, I use Google site search. I have a search plug-in that automatically adds site:ubuntuforums.org to the search string, another one that also adds lovinglinux to the string, so I can find posts that I have answered, and another one that searches for my personal ID tags like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=UKeywords+649167+performance+firefox+site %3Aubuntuforums.org&hl=en&sourceid=mozilla-search&num=20&start=0&start=0

This search plugin only find posts that I "mark" with my own tags like this:

UKeywords: 649167 2009 june firefox performance

I only add these personal tags to posts that want to easily find. It's not the same as the tag feature of the forum. I actually add the tags above to the post body, not the thread.

BTW, I think the forum traffic is heavy 24/7, but the moderators should be able to pull some statistics about forum access.

[mikjp]

But probably the time when there are most readers for the first page is at the same time the time when there are most new posts. This would mean that the post stays the shortest time on the first page :-)

[forrestcupp]

That's an interesting question. I've wondered that, too. I've noticed that there are a lot of people on here all the time. But the weekends seem the slowest. That's when you'd have the best chance of keeping your thread on page 1 for a while. But I'm not sure that's the time you would have the maximum number of readers while still keeping your thread on page 1.

But on the other hand, I've had threads that I thought were lost forever, and someone pulled them out of the blue to post in them. I don't know why, but it happens.