The Studio

Oh, that looks perfect!! Thank you! 😀

I've been a bit of a task driver lately.  😇

Keep in mind the custom fields like this exist across the software. It is simply a field type which makes an HTML input field of the password type.
There are no means for a password protected download. The only permission system is in the member group, I'm afraid. If you are only giving out select access, you can move these individuals manually to a group for access.
With Commerce and Downloads you can charge for downloads but still no password protection application.

Ah, I see. That could be useful if you were gathering sensitive info.
Understood. Then downloads won't work for us for this application. We already use member groups but that's not practical in this case.
We give out a birthday goodie to ALL active members, so we're talking about thousands of people and daily messages. We already have a way to send out birthday messages each day, but I'm searching for a better way to deliver the goodie.

And just to provide context...  the "password" field can be used anywhere you don't want the input displayed back to the user.  For example, if they were entering a Social Security number or any other sensitive field.  It's just a display mechanism.  

We desperately need this feature. Honestly I find it hard to believe it's not already included - it's essential for any community running any sort of scheduled event. 
I've sorted through the available apps & I cannot find any that offer this. Am I missing it? Has anyone found a way to do this in 4.5.3? 

@Rhett Thank you!!

We desperately need this feature. Honestly I find it hard to believe it's not already included - it's essential for any community running any sort of scheduled event. 
I've sorted through the available apps & I cannot find any that offer this. Am I missing it? Has anyone found a way to do this in 4.5.3? 

@Jordan Invision suggestion to consider making this a core feature. we can lock / unlock topics during creation but not publish it. Seems like a nice feature addition 🙂

No, you don't. You can overwrite the forum setting for each database category. Just edit a category and switch to Forum tab. This way you only need a new category and not the complete database.

When I hear "duplicate content" I always think about SEO 🙂 There is no duplicate content regarding SEO.
However, you are right, the user who created the article with future publish date will indeed see the article AND the post. To prevent this, a custom solution (like redirecting every article to its assigned post) will be required. In this case, they will not see anything else as the post itself.
I can understand. This is indeed something that should be considered if you have non-technical users. Redirecting article to the assigned post can be solved within the article template, so that they will never see the original article after it is created.

Duplicate content seems pretty weird. So members would post an article to get a topic and in the end would have an article and a topic? Then request to delete the article later? 🥴

Pages creates real posts in your forum. Articles are just for scheduling. When article is published (future published date is reached) then a new post is created in forum. 

You can do it if you have Pages. Just create a database, that is only visible to moderators. Create your posts in a database as articles, connect the database to a forum, where the posts should be post and set the future publish date. No extra feature is needed to accomplish it. Unless you do not have Pages.

@DawPi has such resource if I recall.

@Rhett Thank you!!

We desperately need this feature. Honestly I find it hard to believe it's not already included - it's essential for any community running any sort of scheduled event. 
I've sorted through the available apps & I cannot find any that offer this. Am I missing it? Has anyone found a way to do this in 4.5.3? 

I have 12 customized themes, and none of them are showing the [Change Author] button.
However, as mentioned in my previous post, it shows and works fine with the IPS Default one.

Awww, no, we use a customized theme. We were using a custom theme before the upgrade though and it worked fine. 
SIGH. This should be fun. 
ETA: I checked using default theme and it doesn't work for us either way.

Are you using the IPS Default (Default) theme?
Edit:
Still working for me using the default them.
However, not working with a third party theme.

I seem to be ok on 4.5.4 after updating midweek.

@Rhett Thank you!!

@Rhett Thank you!!

I have brought this up internally for further review, I can't promise anything at this point, but it's being considered for a future version.  Thank you for all of your feedback on this item.