Creating posts
Links and validation errors
Short links, link stripping, and why the composer will not let you save
Short links
If your post contains a URL, Nitty Music Social can shorten it so clicks are trackable. The behaviour is a setting, not a per-post decision:
| Preference | What happens |
|---|---|
| Ask every time | You are prompted before saving |
| Always shortlink | URLs are shortened silently |
| Never shortlink | URLs are left alone |
Set it in Settings, see Settings.
When prompted, the wording is:
Do you want to shortlink the URLs? it will let you get statistics over clicks
Shortened links produce a click table in the post’s statistics.
Channels configured to strip links are excluded from shortening, because the link is going to be removed anyway.
Link stripping
Some setups remove URLs from post text before publishing, most commonly on X, where accounts often see better reach without links. When that is enabled for a channel, links are removed from the text at publish time. Put the link in a follow-up comment instead, see Threads and comments.
On self-hosted Nitty Music Social: link stripping is switched on per platform by whoever runs the instance.
Validation
Nitty Music Social validates a post against every selected channel before saving. If any channel fails, nothing is saved and the composer jumps to the offending channel with the error shown, either on the editor or on its settings panel.
The same validation runs again on the server when you submit, so you cannot bypass it by editing the request.
What usually fails
| Error | Cause |
|---|---|
| Empty content | A selected channel has no text and the platform requires some |
| Too long | Over the character limit for that platform |
| Missing setting | A required per-platform field is empty: YouTube title, Reddit subreddit, Pinterest board |
| Media rules | Wrong number or type of attachments for the platform |
Fixing them
For length, detach the offending channel and write a shorter version rather than cutting the text everywhere. See Global vs per-channel.
For media, check the platform’s rules first, since the constraint usually comes from the platform rather than from Nitty Music Social. See Posting rules by platform.
For required settings, open the channel’s tab in the composer and fill in the Settings panel. Required fields are the ones the platform refuses posts without, so there is no way around them.