What would be the best times to post a question to get the highest number of replies?
Clearly it’s not at 240PM on a Thursday.
I’ve found it mostly depends on the question itself. There are people on here from all over the world. Interesting questions get a lot of responses quickly.
A lot of posters post from work, some almost exclusively; I get a mild sense that posting volumes drop off a bit on the weekends.
It doesn’t even have to be an interesting question, nor one which garners interesting answers. If you want to get a lot of responses, just do something like this:
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Create a title that everyone can say something about. Example: “Toothpaste”
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Describe the fascinating relationship you have to the title. Example: “I always apply my toothpaste in an amount that’s exactly half the length of the brush. But my SO says that’s not enough!”
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Pose a question to which every person who’s trying to kill time at work will be able to contribute their own fascinating facts. Ex: “So, Dopers–How do you all use your toothpaste?”
You’re guaranteed to get hundreds of responses, because everyone wants the world to know about the fascinating details of their lives.
Fair enough. But clearly you agree that content is an important factor. Question is, is Ladymarmalade asking this in a general FYI-type respect, or in the planning of asking something important in the future?
Sometimes the content does make a big difference.
It frequently happens that questions about Jewish holidays are asked on the holiday itself. This is entirely reasonable, since that’s when people are most aware of the holiday, and that is what brings the question to mind. Unfortunately, most of the people who are most knowledgeable about it are very UNlikely to answer it right then, either because their observance of the holiday includes prohibitions against using the computer, or because they’re more busy with the holiday and not so much with Straight Dope. The net result is that others keep bumping it to the top until the holiday passes and those who know are able to respond.
Logically, I suppose this might happen with other religions or occasions as well, but only for things which are celebrated and observed by a minority. On Thanksgiving, for example, no matter how many people are busy eating their turkey, there are still plenty others at the 'puter reading SD. Well, not counting those who post only from work…
Blast. I was sincerely hoping this thread would sink without a reply.
Well, it’s gotten fewer posts than the toothpaste thread. Can you be happy with that?
Not for long! It’s gathering responses pretty steadily.
All right, maybe the toothpaste thing wasn’t such a good idea. Let’s try: this.
What a perfect question to put in ATMB. Moved.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
If you’ve read my reply to that thread, you should realize that your observation is jaundiced at best.
In my reply I made no references whatsoever to my personal life. My post was designed solely to provide information which would be useful not only to the OP but to anyone else who might wander by.
Some of us do have a truly altruistic bent and should not be painted with the same ‘attention whore’ brush that seems to apply to the people you have in mind.
I’m in the UK, so based on UK times, I get most responses between about 11:00am and 5:00pm, and then the overnight crew kick in from about 2:00am to 4:00am. I’ve no idea why.
In this post from At this moment what does your computer’s clock display? started Today, 05:58 AM, I have tried to help gather some data that may answer your question. Depending on the generosity of other Dopers, you may have some factual basis for a reasonable guess.
If it helps any, I have tried to get an answer to your question in the past, and I’ve been aware that weekdays are busier than weekends, and that there’s even a different group of Dopers posting then. Work hours in the USA (6 AM West Coast to 7 PM East Coast) seem to be busier than nights.
Time of year matters, too!
Speaking as someone who is often in “the overnight crew”, the answer is one word. Insomnia. That translates into EDT 10 to 12 pm, when I should be going to bed, but if I can’t sleep, I “Dope”. For the rest of the US, it’s late evening, and they are probably getting in their “last Dope fix of the day”. For the earlier period, I would speculate that, since it’s morning in the US, that’s probably because they are posting from work, and that’s the time their bosses are napping in their offices (or maybe banging their secretaries), so less likely to see that they are “doing Dope”.
I’ve looked through the list of threads I’ve started, and can’t seem to locate the one that deals with the weekday-vs.-weekend issue, but you might find some clues here:
What one hour of the day, on what day, could we expect to find you here?
The Day Nobody Posted
I asked almost the same question as the OP about on a Saturday about a year ago and got ***only ***two answers. Both responses tended to disparage the weekend. One responder has since been banned.
I spent some more time to locate Will this thread last until Monday Aug/8/2005? which I started 08-05-2005, 09:08 AM on a Friday.
You can see that most of the posts were mine:
Who Posted?
Total Posts: 89
User Name Posts
Zeldar 34
Sunspace 11
laina_f 10
Queen Tonya 4
Misnomer 4
Anaamika 3
Scott Plaid 3
Kuizelemartz 3
twickster 2
Feydeau 2
QuickSilver 2
pudytat72 2
Beware of Doug 1
Telperien 1
ParentalAdvisory 1
groman 1
pinkfreud 1
Rufus Xavier 1
Trunk 1
Mr Bus Guy 1
TJdude825 1
It’s quite possible, likely even, that if I hadn’t nursed it along, the thread would have perished much sooner.
It’s been five years, and much has changed in the environment here, but it’s some data to consider and shoot down.
Anyway, there it is. 
A clever idea, but at the time of the summary you made, the responses spanned a 9-hour period of time. So I don’t know what it tells the OP.
It does, however, confirm my (admittedly exaggerated) point in Post #4 above. People here will post to tell you the length of their left big toe nail, if you ask them. So if you want to get a lot of responses, pose a question–however mundane–that everyone can answer. It doesn’t matter that clearly no one is going to be in the slightest interested in their left big toe–they will still go to the trouble to post in order to let you know the length of its nail.