When is the best time to post a work?

I've always kind of wondered this; that is, is there a best time to post your work on YWS? If you post at 7 am, will you get more reviews? Well, turns out that maybe there is a best time.

First, a caveat: I only checked this for the month of December 2011. Plus, I only checked hours, not days. So even though X hour may generally be the best time to post a work, it may not be the best time every day! And I'm sure this differs month to month.

So, what's the best time? Literary works posted between 2pm and 3pm GMT during December saw an average of 4.77 reviews each! The worst time was between 9am and 10am GMT. Works posted at that time saw only an average of 2.46 reviews each.

For the most part, though, there was very little difference; most hours saw about 3.2 to 3.4 reviews per literary work. The lesson to take away then is to post your work when both the UK and the USA (73% of YWSers come from one of those 2 countries) are awake.

I've noticed, also, that works posted on Friday tend to get buried as a ton of people post that day. Saturday is often a better day, as the flood of after-school posters has died down and the weekend reviewers are revving up.

And while this may sound like common sense--remember, if you know there's a Reviewing Sunday coming up, it can be quite worth it to wait until just before the post lock, so that your piece is among the top unreviewed recent stuff :P

Looking at who's in chat on the homepage can also give you a very rough, general indicator to who is online. If there is 5+ members in chat, you're probably more likely to get a review than if there were 1 or 2, simply because the chatters always seem to be looking for something to get their teeth into.

December 2010, you mean.
Also, there's a pretty good amount of reviewing right before the average US Sunday mid-morning including Saturday nights. And then, there's another peak somewhere toward the end of Sundays.

It's even a good idea to keep an eye on the Leader board. Every now and again, you can sort of notice a pattern where every now and again, a pair or more of users are battling each other for the top number of reviews. And depending on who the reviewers are, you can sometimes chance getting a good review or two from the battlers while they're on the battle path.

I know Firearris and I were review warring with each other but we had a rule that we couldn't just post poor reviews for the sake of winning and a lot of the time we would catch ourselves reviewing the same stuff one after the other. So plenty of users ended up with two good reviews from the both of us.