Plenty of folks want to write articles and schedule when they actually go live on their WordPress instance. I’ve run into the ‘Missed Schedule’ issue with a customer before but recently ran into this on my own blog.
The post scheduler uses wp-cron. One critical thing about wp-cron is it requires visitors to actually visit your page! That is probably why I have a problem with it, I have doubts anybody reads this shit and well hey here is the proof.
Per the wordpress docs found here, the easy solution, assuming you have access to your webserver and it is a linux box, is to automate some hits to your site side-stepping the problem that no one reads it.
root@www:~# crontab -e
*/3 * * * * wget http://rushworx.net/wp-cron.php
I will have to test this to make sure it actually solves the problem, but I suspect it will.