Thankful the Cowboys Play on Thanksgiving!

"Dummy" meme for new templates? Please elaborate :)

To get them to post faster?

Yeah. You delete it after? post it blank?

No, it's just a matter of how the imgflip database sees the template. I break it down into 4 categories:
1. Popular Templates - One Does Not Simply, etc
2. Custom Templates - Think Jying and Socrates who make a specific template that's specific to one meme and will never be used again.
3. Established templates - Templates THAT HAVE BEEN SAVED TO THE DATABASE and have at least 1 featured meme to their credit (look at my memes that have pictures you haven't seen before (I've gotten worse at adding the "My Templates Challenge" tag recently, this one should have had it) and look at "My Templates Challenge" tagged memes for reference. These are all now Established Templates
4. New templates - Have not yet had a meme feature using this specific template ID number.

New templates will generally only post 4 or 5 times daily in big batches, so if you miss the cutoff time yours could be behind 10 hours worth of "new templates" and feature on page 20. Occasionally a handful make it through outside of the big batches, but those are the exception, not the rule.

Once a New Template has been saved to the database and featured it follows the same rules as a Popular Template, meaning it could hit the site an hour and five minutes after you submit it.

There's no way around that initial wait time the first time you submit unless you have a good handle on the times that New Templates get reviewed (which I used to have mastered, but timing has been inconsistent lately, and forget about it during U.S. holidays or when the good mods take a vacation).

The best example is my two most recent Abe Lincoln memes. I purposefully posted a crappy one right after the deadline so it'd get buried and get minimal views/upvotes and stay off the hot pages because I wanted to make sure a good one I had for it could post right away just a few days later and still feel fresh (in my big push to get to 1,000,000).

Very useful and informative information thank you :)

Absolutely. Specific example with this meme. It was relevant because the Cowboys were playing on Thanksgiving day, but if they make the playoffs or Super Bowl I want to be able to post it then and not have to worry about getting buried. I want to be able to post it when other custom templates aren't going to be released because it'll be higher on the newest pages.

The best bad submission time is when all the New Templates feature. That almost guarantees you'll be behind at least 5 hours worth of customs once yours gets around to featuring.

So early morning?

4 or 5 a.m. Central (or at least when I was on overnights it was) is probably the worst time you could submit a custom once we get out of the holiday timing. Even popular memes are taking longer than they should.

Good to know! Thank you very much. IOU a beer

:)

It's not December or January, so the eagle doesn't need to be concerned about choking yet.

It's true lol