🚨Article published when should be held, AND CANNOT BE UNPUBLISHED

[RCheesley]

Hi folks,

I just scheduled an article to go live at 12.30 pm on 17th February in the press releases section.

1. I set the moderation publish date to this date/time and set the status to published. This should hold the publishing of the article until that date and time arrives, but instead it was publicly visible immediately.
2. I immediately went back to the article, edited it and set the status to draft, but no matter what I did or how many times I saved it, the content status remained public in the back end list of content and visible still in the front end, despite it saying Draft on the article itself.

I had to resort to deleting the article entirely as it was time sensitive information which must not leak early.

I checked this incognito and in browsers where I wasn't logged in, the article was accessible.

We really need to fix this, it's totally unreliable as sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and this is at least the third time when it's resulted in information being shared ahead of the scheduled time.

See related issues:

#32 - Discourse posting despite article not being published yet

https://github.com/mautic/mautic-org-website/issues/287 (this issue, originally reported November 2021)

https://github.com/mautic/mautic-org-website/issues/175 (this issue, originally reported in November 2020)

[nick-vanpraet]

I'm not entirely sure, but I think this has to do with how revision and moderation work together.

You create the article, set publish on date but also set the current state to Published -> it is immediately published.
You edit, set the state to Draft -> a new revision is created with state Draft, BUT that revision is not marked as the default revision that Drupal shows when people visit the page (only published and unpublished states can be set as default revision iirc) so nothing happens from a visitor's perspective as the previous revision that was Published is still being shown.

I believe if you had set it to Unpublished that it would have worked, but again not sure as it depends how the site was built.

In any case, I don't think this is a bug, just how the system works.

[RCheesley]

I did set it back to Draft (assume that's what you mean by 'unpublished') - should it have been a different state?

So the workflow should be save as draft -> set moderation date -> publish?

Will this make it only publish on the moderation date?

[nick-vanpraet]

Only way to know for sure is to try it out, on a QA environment if needed but yes I think leave it in Draft or Unpublished and use the Publish on field to publish it.

And no, I don't mean Draft I mean specifically "Unpublished" if you want to remove it from prying eyes. Draft can never be set as default revision, the other two can (afaik).