Even though the post hasn’t shown up on your site, it gets sent off into the world of pinging and feeds — basically blog post listings, you know… so someone found the post through there! Unfortunate if you really wanted to keep it hidden from the world until then. 🙁 Just won’t happen.
Unfortunately future-dated posts are actually present on the web, just not linked on your blog until the scheduled time.
It’s something to watch out for if this is a concern.
(You can always keep a post in your Drafts, and that isn’t accessible outside your Admin… but it won’t auto-post at your desired time, you have to click Publish)
I posted a related and unanswered post to this issue previously as it also causes new categories to show up even if all the posts are currently scheduled for the future. (Thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/59735?replies=2)
Simply saving in drafts is not the answer because the point of future-posting is to not have to go on line in the future to actually post it. (I think I just gave myself a headache trying to state that coherently.) Is there any chance that this is on the list of features for a future WP release, that one can future post and it doesn’t ping/post/mutate lead into gold until the actual scheduled time of posting?
Thanks for humoring me…
Thread Starter
dwest
(@dwest)
Thanks for the reply.
WE NEED A PLUGIN TO HALT PINGING ON FUTURE POSTS!
Somebody jump on that please!
Thanks for all replies!
dwest: No need to shout.
This plugin already exists, it’s part of the WP-Cron package and is called “wp-cron-future-pings”.
http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/plugins/wp-cron/
I may give this a try…although the info on that page is less than comforting concerning the stability of “wp-cron-future-pings”. I’d still like the issue of categories not being listed if they contain nothing but future posts addressed if possible. Thanks.
Thread Starter
dwest
(@dwest)
Sorry for the shout. Actually it was meant tongue in cheek. I forgot to put the smiley in.
It is quite an oversight though, wouldn’t you agree?
I haven’t been able to get any of skippy’s stuff to work in my install so perhaps someone else should give this plugin a try. I’m running a Windows server, could be that is the conflict. (And no, I’m not a newbie at this.)
Never the less, a reliable, working plugin or added feature in the next release is needed.
It really defeats the purpose of post dating if visitors are going to get access to those posts via the feed or pinging of Bloglines. RSS and Bloglines are quite popular ways of accessing content.
One of the problems is that pinging takes too much time. When you publish a post, you probably wait 30 seconds or more, while WordPress is pinging your selected services.
Now, imagine a visitor coming to your blog, and it just so happens that it’s the first visitor after your future post is supposed to be published. So, WordPress shows the new post. If using WP-Cron or any other similar tool, do you really want the visitor to have to wait 30 seconds, while the pinging is happening? If the visitor is impatient, he or she could actually abort your pinging! (And probably won’t stick around to actually read your post…)
There is a plugin that somehow makes this ping delay disappear, but I never investigated that. Maybe it could be used here, but still you are putting your visitors in a position where they unknowingly can make sure your future posts aren’t pinged!
The only solution I can think of is to use the actual UNIX cron tool, to fire a plugin every hour or so, checking if it should ping the services. Such a plugin would be very easy to implement, but much harder to configure and use. Not nearly as userfriendly as WordPress. I’m not going to do this, as I have moved on to another blog tool, but I’m sure someone will.
Oh, and this is not a WordPress-specific problem. It will occur with every single blog tool on the planet, unless it uses cron jobs already.
