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.
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.
http://trac.ww.wp.xz.cn/
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.
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…
