I have been loving the new thumbnail upload feature!
However, it's possible that users will attempt to click 'Publish' before their thumbnail is done uploading to spee.ch.
In this case, we should have a message similar to "You must agree to terms and service" that lets them know that they can't publish without the thumbnail being published.

I think it makes the most sense if this message only pops up AFTER they click on agreeing to the terms and services. This way they don't see two messages at once saying "You must..." (we don't want to seem too demanding).
This also makes it so that they never see the message until they're actually ready to publish and the thumbnail upload is the only thing preventing them from it.
I was aware of this but didn't file because once the new wallet is implemented, the response time from speech should be a couple seconds.
Let's keep open until it's confirmed.
You mean it will only take a couple of seconds to upload the thumbnail?
Yes, sorry for not being clearer.
This is a good issue and worth fixing even with a performance improvement to spee.ch since you never know when a request will hang.
However, from a UX perspective the proper behavior is not to error (since nothing unexpected or incorrect is happening) but to simply provide feedback that the thumbnail is still pending. Once it's no longer pending, the publish should finish automatically, with no click required by the user.
Agreed, we should implement this regardless. I may take a stab at it this weekend, shouldn't be too difficult.