Threads Thread drafts and scheduling a thread to be published in the future
 

These two suggestions are interrelated. Please allow creating thread drafts and allow threads to be scheduled for publishing in the future.

Thread drafts—

The ability to use drafts and the max number of drafts you can have would depend on usergroup permissions. If a user has permission to use drafts then when creating a thread, they will have the option to save it as a draft instead of posting it. Your saved drafts appear in red at the top of the forum they were created in (obnoxious enough so you won't want to have a lot of them sitting around indefinitely), and in a list of drafts in the User CP. You can only create drafts by creating a thread in a forum, there wouldn't be any special User CP interface for creating them.

Publishing in the future—

The ability to publish a thread in the future would depend on a usergroup permission, and on the "thread drafts" usergroup permission. If you have permission to create drafts and permission to publish in the future, then when creating a thread, you will have the option to schedule the thread to be published in the future. If you do so, it will be saved as a draft and timestamped for future publishing. Threads scheduled for future publishing would show up in red at the top of the forum they were created in (just as with drafts), but will show the time/date they will be published. Like drafts, they will also be displayed somewhere in the User CP. Technically, the publishing could take place with an hourly cron job (not perfectly exact, especially on low-traffic boards) or by simply posting the thread with a timestamp in the future. The second option would necesitate reworking a bunch of queries that pull threads to not pull anything with a timestamp in the future. When publishing the thread that was scheduled, if there are any permissions problems (user doesn't have permission to post in that forum anymore etc.), then the thread would not be published and it would stay as a draft in their User CP. I'd prefer the publishing use a cron job so it has the permission check, even if it is less exact as to when the thread gets published.

Thanks for considering these suggestions! :)