When you're ready, you can publish your ladder by clicking the publish button on the manage page, or clicking publish from the edit page. Publishing your ladder will open it up to start receiving activists who trigger conditions on your rungs. However, you will no longer be able to add steps or rungs to your ladder or delete steps or rungs. You will only be able to add or remove triggers from rungs and edit step parameters. Ladders also cannot be unpublished, so be sure your ladder is ready to go before you publish it.
Once published, ladders have four statuses, which can be changed with the toggle switches on the right of the manage page:
Active
When ladders are active, activists will enter the ladder when they trigger conditions on your rungs as normal and move through until they exit.
Closed
When ladders are closed, activists will no longer enter them when they trigger conditions, but activists already in the ladder (waiting at a wait step, for example) will continue to progress until they exit.
Stopped
When ladders are stopped, activists will no longer enter them when they trigger conditions and activists currently in the ladder will be flushed and exited without moving to further steps, clearing the ladder of all activists.
Paused
When ladders are paused, activists in wait steps will remain there, until the ladder is unpaused, then the activist will resume moving through the ladder. This is helpful during an emergency or event where you want to pause people at a wait step before sending them your regular stream of messages. Note that people will continue through each step in the ladder until they reach a wait step, so you should include one at the top of the ladder to make this effective.
If published, you can schedule a ladder to become active, stopped, or closed at a date and time in the future by clicking the schedule link in the sidebar of the ladder's manage page. You can cancel a scheduling afterwards if you would like.