A vault is not one door. It is four of them.
Visibility is a setting on the event, not on the schedule. Public, Draft, Internal, or Unlisted with a password, and the rest of your calendar carries on exactly as it did.
One event. Four ways to leave it.
Set per eventListed on your schedule and everywhere it feeds.
Hidden until you publish it. Not a permanent state.
Hidden permanently. There is no publish button.
Off the schedule, open to anyone holding the link.
Members are the people signed in to your schedule. Everyone else meets the door you chose.
The setting
It is one field on the event, not a plan you move to.
Open the event, open Details, choose a door. Nothing else about the event changes.
Listed publicly. Anyone can find and view it.
Members only. Publish when you are ready.
Members only. Never shown publicly.
Not listed. Anyone with the link can view, with an optional password.
What follows the choice
- The password field appears only for Unlisted, because a password is only meaningful on a link anyone can hold.
- Move an event off Unlisted and the stored password is cleared, so a stale one can never keep a published event locked.
- Switching something hidden back to Public warns you first: saving will make this event visible to everyone.
- The quick Publish action is offered for a Draft and never for an Internal event, in the interface or on the route behind it.
The register
Every door, and what it opens onto.
This is the whole feature on one page. Each column is a real surface, and each cell is the filter that surface is built from.
| Visibility | Your public schedule page | Direct link | iCal, RSS, sitemap | Discovery search | Tickets and RSVP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public Free | Listed | Opens | Included | Listed | Open to everyone |
| Draft Free | Hidden | Members only | Excluded | Excluded | Members only |
| Internal Enterprise | Hidden | Members only | Excluded | Excluded | Members only |
| Unlisted Enterprise | Hidden | Opens with the link | Excluded | Excluded | Password required |
Members only
Every cell above is what a guest gets. Signed in, you and your members see all four states on the schedule page, badged Draft or Internal. A Draft or Internal event will not open on a direct link either.
Password required
Checkout and registration on an Unlisted event are taken from members, or from a guest who has entered the password. Selling to an invite list means setting one.
A separate gate
Whatever the visibility, an event only appears on a schedule that has accepted it. Acceptance is its own gate and applies to all four states.
The numbered box
Hand out a link. Or a link and a key.
An Unlisted event is off your schedule, out of the feeds and out of search, and its own URL still works. Add a password and the URL alone stops being enough.
What a link holder sees first
The title, and nothing else. No description, no venue, no line-up, no price. Unlock it once and the browser remembers for that visitor, on that device, for the rest of the session.
What is not in the page
The gate is not a curtain.
A locked event does not render its own page with the details hidden; the request is answered by the prompt above instead. And where a locked event does appear in a listing, the payload is built with these keys emptied before it is serialised, rather than shipped to the browser and covered over.
- The event image null
- Venue name null
- Venue images null
- Talent on the bill null
- The agenda null
- Fan videos null
- Recent comments null
What survives
Of the fan content only the counts survive, never a photo, a video or a line of a comment.
The locked page is also marked noindex and nofollow, and its social preview tags carry the password notice in place of the event: no name, no description, and the generic Event Schedule card rather than your image. Pasting the link into a chat gives nothing away.
And if your schedule is on the free plan and shows ads, none are ever rendered in front of a password prompt.
The staff door
Draft means not yet. Internal means not ever.
They hide an event the same way. What differs is what happens next, and the product takes that difference seriously.
A published event that has not been published yet
Build the event, hold the date, get the copy right. Your members see it on the calendar with a Draft badge, and one Publish action turns it into a normal public event and starts its calendar sync.
Free on every plan, on any schedule type.
An event that was never for the public
The board meeting, the staff party, the rehearsal. Internal carries its own badge on your calendar, is never offered a Publish action, and refuses one if a request is crafted by hand. There is no password to circulate because there is no link to circulate.
Restoring a backup re-applies the rule, so an Internal event cannot come back published.
The house default
Decide once which door is the default.
Your schedule's Advanced settings hold the state every new event starts in. Set it to Draft and nothing goes out by accident.
On the schedule
A starting state
Public, Draft, Internal or Unlisted. New events open on it, and you can change any individual event afterwards.
On submissions
Guests cannot choose
The public request form cannot set a visibility of its own. Anything sent in lands on your default, whatever the form was made to say.
On the API
The same default
An API call that names no visibility inherits the schedule default, so a drafts-by-default schedule never publishes something silently.
A lapse never publishes what you hid
Internal and Unlisted are Enterprise states. If the plan lapses, the next save of an Internal or Unlisted event turns it into a Draft, so it stays hidden. The default is the one thing to check: on a schedule that is no longer Enterprise a default of Internal falls back to Draft, but a default of Unlisted falls back to Public. Leave Draft as the default and a lapse cannot change what a new event starts as.
Selfhosting? A selfhosted installation has every feature, so all four doors are open to you. Selfhost Event Schedule
Every other surface
A door is only shut if every wall holds.
Hiding an event is not much use if it leaks out of a feed, a round-up or a shared image. Here is the rest of the wall.
Feeds, sitemap and discovery
FreeThe public iCal feed, the RSS feed, the XML sitemap and the search on eventschedule.com are all built from one filter: not a draft, not unlisted, not cancelled, and accepted by the schedule. The feeds and the sitemap turn away anything still holding a password as well.
Four separate surfaces, one rule. That is deliberate: a privacy setting that each surface interprets for itself is a privacy setting that eventually gets one of them wrong.
Newsletters
FreeThe upcoming-events block a newsletter builds for you skips drafts, unlisted, cancelled and password-protected events, so a round-up cannot carry one out to your whole list.
Shareable graphics
ProGenerated event graphics are drawn from the same public set, so a hidden event is not in one and cannot end up in an image you post. The scheduled graphic email, an Enterprise extra, is built from that same query.
Promotions and ads
A draft or unlisted event cannot be put behind an on-network promotion. The purchase form refuses it, the submit behind the form checks again before the card is charged, and the serving pool re-checks every time it picks a promotion, so an event you hide after a campaign starts stops being shown. On the other side of the same wall, a free schedule's ads are never rendered in front of a password prompt.
A refusal at the door and a filter at serve time, which together are the difference between an event that is hard to find and an event that is not there.
Backups
FreeExport your schedule and import it again and the visibility rule is re-applied on the way in, so a hand-edited or legacy file cannot restore an Internal event as a public one.
Sync to your own calendar
FreeDraft and Internal events are never pushed to a connected calendar. An Unlisted event is pushed, and it is written as private: private visibility on Google, private sensitivity on Outlook, and CLASS:PRIVATE on CalDAV.
That is the distinction that matters. Your own calendar is not a public surface, so an unlisted event belongs on it, marked for what it is. How calendar sync works
What people keep behind the door
The same calendar, with a private half.
Members and subscribers
Previews, classes and sessions that belong to the people who pay for them. Internal keeps them off every public surface with no password to circulate.
Invitation-only nights
A launch or a donor reception you hand out rather than announce. Send the link, send the password, and the event never touches your public calendar.
Company and staff events
All-hands, offsites and the staff party. They belong on the calendar your team reads and nowhere else, which is exactly what Internal is for.
Holds and rehearsals
Dates you are holding while a contract is still moving. Draft is free on every plan, so a hold sits on your calendar and nobody else's.
Free forever. Upgrade when you're ready.
Zero platform fees on ticket sales. You only pay Stripe's processing fee.
See all plansFrequently asked questions
Everything worth knowing before you hide something.
How do I make an event private?
Every event has a Visibility setting in its Details section, with four options. Public lists it. Draft keeps it to members until you publish it. Internal keeps it to members permanently. Unlisted keeps it off your schedule while the direct link still opens, with an optional password. Public and Draft are on every plan; Internal and Unlisted are Enterprise.
Can I mix public and private events on the same schedule?
Yes. Visibility is stored on the event, not on the schedule, so Public, Draft, Internal and Unlisted events can sit side by side on one calendar. Public events carry on appearing normally while the hidden ones stay out of every public surface.
Where exactly does a hidden event disappear from?
Your public schedule page and its calendar, the public iCal and RSS feeds, the XML sitemap, the discovery search on eventschedule.com, the upcoming-events block in a newsletter, and the generated event graphics. A hidden event also cannot be put behind an on-network promotion. The one door left open is the direct link, and only for Unlisted.
Does a private event still sync to my own calendar?
Draft and Internal events are never pushed to a connected calendar at all. An Unlisted event is pushed, and it is written as private: private visibility on Google, private sensitivity on Outlook, and CLASS:PRIVATE on CalDAV. The public iCal and RSS feeds your visitors subscribe to leave all three out.
Can I sell tickets to an unlisted event?
Yes, and this is the one thing worth knowing before you set it up. Ticket checkout and registration on an Unlisted event are accepted from signed-in members of the schedule, or from a guest who has entered the event password. If you want an unlisted event to sell to the people you sent the link to, give it a password.
Can a sub-schedule be private?
No, and it is worth being clear about it. Sub-schedules organise and colour-code events on one link; they carry a name, a slug and a colour, and no visibility flag at all. Hiding is always a setting on the event itself.
What happens to my hidden events if my plan lapses?
They stay hidden. Internal and Unlisted are Enterprise states, so on the next save of a schedule that is no longer Enterprise an Internal or an Unlisted event becomes a Draft. Nothing you hid is ever flipped public by a downgrade, and a restored backup keeps the same invariant, so an Internal event cannot come back published. The one setting worth re-checking is your schedule default: for a schedule that is no longer Enterprise, a default of Internal falls back to Draft, while a default of Unlisted falls back to Public for new events.
Which plan includes private events?
Internal and Unlisted visibility are on the Enterprise plan. Public and Draft are on every plan, including Free, and a schedule-wide default visibility can be set on any of them. A selfhosted installation has every feature, so Internal and Unlisted are available there too.
Some events are nobody else's business.
Publishing your calendar and holding dates as drafts are free forever. Internal and Unlisted visibility come with Enterprise, and a selfhosted installation has all four.
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