Publicize to Tumblr VERY unreliable

it just seems very unreliable and spotty and I have to manually add many of the posts.

Could you try to reset your Publicize connection, and let me know if it helps?

Additionally, the format of the posts sometimes varies.

It seems that one of the posts is marked as an Image post, while the other is just a standard post with an image inserted in it.
Did you define a Featured Image for both posts? It might also be worth adding the image post format to your theme, to have a better control over the posts publicized to Tumblr.

Also, I still would really like the post excerpt to be longer.

As I mentioned in our last conversation, I took note of your request, and we’ll consider allowing you to use a custom excerpt there.

Could you try to reset your Publicize connection

I’ve tried that several times, and it’s hard to tell if it makes any difference since Publicize works sometimes and not other times. It definitely doesn’t stick, though.

It seems that one of the posts is marked as an Image post, while the other is just a standard post with an image inserted in it.

Right, that’s what I meant — they’re different formats on Tumblr. All our posts have Featured Images, so that can’t be it. I’ll look into the post format thing, but I’m a little confused about that. Our posts (on WordPress) are usually a pretty standard format — image at the top with text and other images or embedded video/audio throughout — so I’m not sure that’ll make much difference for Tumblr, but maybe I just don’t understand this completely? I don’t want it to change how it shows up on WordPress.

As I mentioned in our last conversation, I took note of your request

OK, thanks. I don’t mean to nag or anything, just wanted to mention it again. I’m sorry if I seemed pushy!

Thanks again for your help.

All our posts have Featured Images, so that can’t be it. I’ll look into the post format thing

Thanks for the extra details. That seems like a bug with Publicize to Tumblr. We will investigate, and I will get back to you when I have some news.

I’ve tried that several times, and it’s hard to tell if it makes any difference since Publicize works sometimes and not other times. It definitely doesn’t stick, though.

Do you use a third-party application to post to your site, or do you use a plugin to help you create new posts by duplicating older ones? It would be helpful if you could walk me through the steps you follow to publish a post on your site.

Thanks!

All our posts are made directly in the WordPress editor. The vast majority are scheduled to post at a later time (this doesn’t seem to make any difference as far as posting to Tumblr). When we first upgraded to 3.5 we had trouble with scheduled posts not posting, so we use the WP Missed Schedule plugin to compensate for that — I wonder if that could be a factor? I don’t know if there’s a way to tell whether or not a given post went up as scheduled on its own or with the help of the plugin.

Thank you!

What happens when you deactivate this plugin? Does WordPress miss a lot of your scheduled posts?
It might be worth trying to deactivate it for a little while, and see if that changes anything with Publicize.

Let me know how it goes!

I deactivated it and the next scheduled post didn’t go up, so it does seem necessary. Before we got this plugin, none of our scheduled posts were going up.

Alright. Missed schedules are often caused by server issues. You can read more about it here:
https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-missed-schedule/faq/

While the WP Missed Schedule solves this issue on your site, the way it changes the post status from scheduled to published might be what’s causing the Publicize issue.
I’ll investigate more, and see if we can solve this conflict or contact the plugin author to work together on this issue.

OK, thank you!

We recently (May of this year) redesigned our site and switched servers. At that time was when we upgraded to 3.5 and noticed the posts weren’t going up as scheduled. So it could be a server issue. I checked wp-cron.php as suggested on that FAQ and it was blank, so I’ll try Solution #2 later today.

Update: I tried their Solution #2 and updated Jetpack, then scheduled a post for 12 pm. It’s now 12:08 and it hasn’t posted. Is there anything else I can try other than reactivating the plugin? Thanks!

Update #2: I rescheduled it for 1 pm and it went up at 2 pm.

Could you let me know what your timezone settings are, under Settings > General in your dashboard? That may explain the delay in publishing.

UTC-4, which shows a correct “local time” for me.

Update about scheduling: some posts go up late (as mentioned), some right on time, others not at all. So I don’t think it’s a time zone thing.

Thanks for the extra details.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid it might have something to do with your server configuration. Something must not be working properly if you can’t use the standard WordPress scheduling features without any additional plugin like WP Missed Schedule.

We’ll look into it though, and try to understand why Publicize doesn’t seem to work when using the WP Missed Schedule plugin.

I’ll get back to you when I have some news.

Hm, okay. Do you think we should contact our web host about it?

Regarding the thing about some posts posting as Photos and others as Text, I noticed it seems to post as Text when there’s a gallery in the post. All the posts have Featured Images, though, and have a non-gallery image inserted at the top of the post, so I don’t know why that should matter, but it seems to be the cause anyway.

Thanks again for your continued help! It’s very much appreciated!