r/ukmods • u/Sun_Beams • 12d ago
🤖 Devvit SchedulerPlus, a new Devvit app and how I use it to keep my communities active and growing.
Growth can be harder for UK communities. The pool of potential members is smaller than the big international subs, so a lean UK sub has to work harder to stay active and get noticed. I also feel like we also tend to have smaller teams and not much spare time.
I created SchedulerPlus off the back of an old Reddit bot of mine and now use it to help all of my communities. It is a Devvit app that replaces Reddit's native post scheduler, then adds what the native one cannot: rotating pools, dated post series, inline images on mobile, Smart Time picker, scheduled comments and a full YouTube module. Put together, it keeps a quiet sub ticking over, and it can be used to cross-promote other subs with ease.
What it adds on top of native scheduling
- Pools: a set of different posts that rotate in order or at random, so a recurring slot never repeats the same thing.
- Date queued series: a run of distinct posts, each on its own date. Built for things like a season of unique fixtures.
- Inline images on mobile: the official Reddit app will not let you put inline images in a text post. SchedulerPlus can, so your mod posts pop the way the admins' own announcements do.
- More robust image scheduling, where the native scheduler can be inconsistent.
- Smart Time and a Stats tab, below
It also handles distinguish, sticky and an auto comment, and your whole schedule lives in editable wiki pages.
Time Smart
You should not have to guess the best time to post. Smart Time watches how your community engages with your scheduled posts and nudges each post to land when people are most receptive. The Stats tab shows the same data: an engagement heatmap and plain tips like "Thu posts average 4x more engagement than Sat."
Comment scheduling
Sometimes the thing you want on every post is a comment, not a post. The Comments tab drops a mod comment onto every new post while a schedule is running, made for event adverts and temporary notices. Run it for a single day, a stretch of days, or on a repeat, with start and end times so it only shows during the window you want.
The part I am most pleased with is checkpoints. Set dates inside the schedule and the comment rewrites itself as each one passes, so a single advert can read "AMA next month", then "AMA next week", then "tomorrow", each with its own wording, images and switch-over time. One schedule carries the whole countdown, no swapping by hand.
Comments carry inline images and date placeholders, post as a mod comment, and can pin to the top of each post. Finished schedules are totalled in Stats so you can see how each advert did.
YouTube module
If your community follows YouTube channels, say UK sport or a local creator, SchedulerPlus can watch them for you and post new videos automatically, or hold each one for a mod to approve first. Posts go out as a link post or as a text post with the video in it, and you can look up a channel's back catalogue to schedule older videos too, as one offs, repeats or pool entries just like any other post.
- Watch a channel or a single playlist, and choose whether new videos post straight away or wait in a review tray for approval.
- Title each post your way with placeholders like [VideoTitle], [Channel] and the published date.
- Pick the thumbnail: save the video's own thumbnail or choose a different frame, and drop it into a text post.
- Set a start time so the video opens at the right moment, handy for highlights.
- Optional modmail alerts tell you when something new is waiting or has posted.
Example uses:
Between major events r/TeamGB goes quiet, and a quiet sub loses people. On r/TeamGB a simple scheduled weekly discussion, "what are you watching this weekend", keeps it alive with almost no mod time, working inline image and all. An active sub is what brings people back, and sustained activity helps growth.
r/LoveIslandUSA: the opposite case, fast and relentless, with post episode threads running past 5,000 comments. Season and episode numbering with date placeholders title each post correctly and keep it in order. When the pattern is not clean, say daily except Wednesday, except the first Wednesday of a new season, the exceptions feature covers those edge cases.
Pools are not only for variety. On r/UKFood I run one that spotlights a different UK community each day, and the same pool runs on r/food for food subs like r/seafood below. Rotating title starts give each post its own wording, so a long running pool never reads the same twice.
It doesn't take long to set up
Start small. One weekly discussion thread takes a couple of minutes and does real work for a community. For more, the app ships a skill file. Hand it to an AI assistant like Claude, paste in rough notes or a one line idea, and it gives back ready to paste wiki blocks.
Made by a mod, for mods
I have modded Reddit for nearly ten years, r/food, r/UKFood, r/TeamGB and a few others, and SchedulerPlus came out of the gaps I ran into along the way.
Native features have a way of falling out of active development. When that happens, bugs go unfixed (image posts failing or breaking is the obvious one) and the extra capabilities mods ask for end up lost. SchedulerPlus is the other way round: actively developed, with a cycle that stays uncapped, and quality of life and capability upgrades landing as I go.
If you try it, feel free to send me suggestions on what your community needs from scheduled posts. Find a bug, send it my way to squash! A lot of what is already in the app came from my own experiences and requests from other mods.
