Scheduling post allows viewing if url known

Scheduling posts is working for me, only too well…

I was shocked to discover today that even though I schedule a post to be published at a later date, a reader can still view the post if he/she knows the url, which can be more or less easily guessed since I follow a pretty consistent permalink structure.

This effectively makes the schedule post feature useless as far as scheduling press releases under NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) which stipulates that a press release cannot be published until a certain date and a certain time — usually midnight or some unearthly hour when we should be sleeping :).

So, what I am resorting to doing now to prevent accidental viewing of a scheduled post is to append it with some gobbledygook characters so the permalink cannot be guessed. Then, go in later, after publication, and edit out the offending characters. Not an elegant solution at all since I’m changing permalink…

Anyone has a solution / plugin for this? Thanks in advance!