# What would be the best and worst time to ask questions on Physics Stack Exchange?

Perhaps somebody may know the time (of a specific timezone) where most people are online and offline.

• Related question on main meta: meta.stackexchange.com/q/1313/209806 and links therein. – Qmechanic Aug 12 '15 at 9:43
• Slightly better link: meta.stackexchange.com/q/213603 and the data queries linked. – Emilio Pisanty Aug 12 '15 at 10:31
• IMO, getting a good answer should trump getting a fast one; it is not always the case that the good answer is the fast one. So, as I see it, "best and worst times" are completely irrelevant. – Kyle Kanos Aug 12 '15 at 13:28
• It's not that just because a "less authorititative" user answers your question, a "more authoritative" user will not answer too. I feel that phrase is unnecessary in your question. – Gaurav Aug 12 '15 at 13:36
• Hi Neil, from the comments, I would guess you have altered your post from its original, which I did not see. Sticking purely to the timezone part, I can only tell you my own experience is: 7pm GMT to 10 GMT is optimum for my questions to get noticed (if at all:) – user81619 Aug 17 '15 at 18:03

## 2 Answers

I've tried to chart when questions usually get more views and answers or when answers of my own get more attention. It seems to have little to do with time. There are usually a fair number of users online at all times. There is a rise and fall in activity on the site and the rate of asked/answered/modified posts through the day, however I never could find a significant relationship between the time and the probability of a question getting a good answer or an answer getting a decent amount of attention.

During peak activity, there are more users, but posts become buried in the active page quicker. During the least active times, there are less users but posts stay on the active page longer. Not only this, but there are good answering users available all through the day. However, the best users to answer your question (based on the topic of the question) may or may not be online at any given time.

The point is that since it is a diurnal cycle of activity, after about a day (based on my observations and controlled for quality of the thread) you have about the same amount of activity for a question no matter when it was posted. Good questions will be upvoted, viewed, and answered. Bad questions will be downvoted, closed, and/or ignored. In all cases, you usually get 1 to 2 days of activity for a given question. Unless it's a HNQ, which can get up to a week extra on our site. After that, only editing the posts will get it a few more views (this is all for average posts. Posts at either ends of the curve will obviously be susceptible to irregular activity).

• A teary eyed +1 for "During peak activity, there are more users, but posts become buried in the active page quicker". I've tasted just that with this old question of mine. I had roughly estimated when the activity is highest, and then posted, so that it gets more attention. Didn't work out. Plus, it got buried so deep that it has managed all of 48 views in 10 months, let alone a satisfactory answer :( – 299792458 Aug 19 '15 at 6:24
• @TheDarkSide Alas, that is the problem. That's why some of my best answers have gotten no or almost no votes. There are time of the year when this is worse though. The start and end of school terms buries posts so quickly that it's almost not worth it to post at all – Jim Aug 19 '15 at 13:41

Well there's actually a Data Query for that1. The results of which are seen below. The y-axis is the average time (in minutes) between the question posting and the answer posted, the x-axis is the day & hour binning of the week in UTC time2

The top 8 days, hours & time difference for the shortest times between question posted and answer given (and for the last year) are:

  Day  |  Hour  |  Time difference
------------------------------------
Sun  |  1300  |     78 min
Sat  |  1700  |     83 min
Tue  |  1600  |     86 min
Thu  |  1200  |     88 min
Mon  |  1400  |     91 min
Mon  |  1300  |     91 min
Sun  |  1100  |     91 min
Fri  |  2000  |     92 min


The mean time across the week is 170 minutes (or 2 hours, 50 minutes)

However, as I stated in a comment, quality answers are what you should be wanting, not fastest answers. In this case, you may be waiting some time (hours into days into weeks) for a good answer to your question.

1 I've modified the original version to eliminate some, IMO, goofy options
2 Here is a handy UTC Time Now calculator in case you don't know what your local time is in UTC.

• Note to self: probably should update this since it's been nearly 5 years since posting & users have come & gone. – Kyle Kanos Jan 2 at 13:21