Private postings show up in RSS view

  • I’m using WordPress 1.5.2 on my site, and noticed the following peculiar behaviour. If I write a new post, set its status to “private,” and publish it, the posting correctly shows up only when I am logged in at the appropriate user level. This is consistent with the documentation, so all is well.

    The trouble arises because if I then load the RSS feed for my site, the private post shows up in the feed. This occurs even when I am not logged in to the site. This seems to me to be a bug, but I thought I would check here first, to see whether anybody else has had this trouble, and whether there is some simple way to fix it.

    Any suggestions?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • I’m wondering about this too. If you can’t prevent a private post from going out RSS, it’s not too private. Maybe I missed a preference setting, but I’d think it would default to not sending out private posts.

    Thread Starter creachadair

    (@creachadair)

    Actually, it seems that unapproved comments also show up. So, for instance, if you have a comment in moderation, it seems to show up in the comments RSS, even if you haven’t approved it yet. This is somewhat bad given the amount of comment spam even a small blog like mine faces.

    Private posts do show up (with a ‘private’ label IIRC) in the feeds. I don’t think it’s ideal, but it’s what you should expect. Prevention of this behaviour is worth posting as a wishlist item, if not a bug. This has gone on for quite some time. Apparently no disdain was voiced.

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    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    To prevent the private posts from completely appearing in your feed, just create an excerpt for your post in the “Excerpt” field when writing your post.

    For example, if you entered “this is a password-protected post” as the excerpt, “the protected content” as the content, and select to password-protect the post, an RSS reader would only see “this is a password-protected post”. He or she would then have to click the link to the post to view the rest and would obviously be confronted with the password request form upon doing so. Thanks to the use of the excerpt, the RSS reader will never see “the protected content” without a password.

    Thread Starter creachadair

    (@creachadair)

    Private posts do show up (with a ‘private’ label IIRC) in the feeds. I don’t think it’s ideal, but it’s what you should expect.

    I disagree that this is the behaviour one should expect. The documentation says:

    Posts marked as “Private” are not visable to any other authors regardless of user levels.

    This wording strongly implies that a post that is marked “private” should not be visible to anybody but their original author. So, I do agree it should be considered a bug; I guess I should go and file it as such.

    Meanwhile, thank you for the clever work-around suggestion of filling in the Excerpt field; I had not thought of that.

    Um, my private posts don’t show up on a feed, but it may be because I’m also running the post levels plugin.

    This feature, by the way, is the main reason I’ve held off upgrading to the new version of WP. I’m sure there’s a feature to handle this kind of thing, but honestly, trawling back through my archives and hiding all the private posts is just big enough a job to put me off updates, as much as I like the WYSIWYG editing in the new WordPress…

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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