tiliondev/fortress/best-time

Reddit best-time-to-post skill

When to use this

Someone asks a version of "when should I post in r/X" or "what's the best time to post in this subreddit," or wants the posting-time pattern of a community. This skill answers it from data rather than folklore.

Inputs

• subreddit (required): the community, without r/ (for example DataHoarder).
• posts (required): how many top posts to analyze. 300 to 700 gives a stable pattern.

Fewer is faster but noisier; more flattens out past a few hundred.

• tz (optional): the IANA timezone for the report, default America/New_York. Use the

timezone the person cares about, for example America/Los_Angeles for Pacific.

Why this works, and its one limit

Reddit's top listings are the posts that won. Reading when those posts were submitted gives a strong proxy for the best time to post. The limit is survivorship: the data shows when hits landed, not the posts that flopped at the same hours. Treat the result as "when successful posts tend to go up," not a guarantee.

Source is old.reddit.com, not the .json API. Reddit's JSON endpoint and normal request paths hard-block datacenter and flagged IPs, but old.reddit's HTML carries exact data-timestamp (epoch milliseconds) and data-score attributes, so the times are precise instead of relative estimates like "3 hours ago." The Fortress stealth engine loads old.reddit without tripping the block page.

Setup

pip install "tilion[mcp]" playwright

No playwright install is needed. The script connects to Fortress over CDP rather than launching Playwright's own browser. On macOS the engine runs as a Docker image, so a Docker daemon must be running (colima start if you use Colima). See `mcp/README.md`.

Run it

python best_time.py --subreddit DataHoarder --posts 600 --tz America/Los_Angeles

The script starts a Fortress instance on port 9400 (override with --port if that is taken), pages through the top listings until it has the requested number of unique posts, and prints the analysis. Roughly 100 posts per page load, with a short politeness pause between pages, so 600 posts takes well under a minute once the engine is warm.

Reading the output

The report has three parts and a recommendation:

• Day of week: the share of top posts on each day, plus the average score. The day with

the largest share is the safest bet.

• Hour of day: the share of top posts in each hour, in the requested timezone. Look for

the plateau of high-share hours, not a single spike.

• Top three-hour windows: the day-and-hour blocks that produced the most top posts. The

first row is the single strongest window.

The final RECOMMENDATION line names the best day and the best three-hour window. Ignore any hour that shows a high average score but a tiny post count, since one viral thread skews it.

If it returns nothing

The subreddit may be private or quarantined, or the engine may be down. On macOS the usual cause is a stopped Docker daemon, so run colima start and retry. For a genuinely hard block, route the engine through a residential proxy with TILION_PROXY before running.

Reference

Fortress tools and setup: `mcp/README.md`. General stealth-browser skill: `mcp/skill/SKILL.md`.