Wordpress - Make future posts visible to the public—not just within WP_Query

In short, you can make future posts visible by telling Wordpress to mark them as 'published' instead of 'scheduled'. You do this by using a future_post hook, which gets called when a post changes status. Each post type automatically gets its own future hook; since the custom post type I'm using is event, I can use the future_event hook. Here is the code:

function setup_future_hook() {
// Replace native future_post function with replacement
    remove_action('future_event','_future_post_hook');
    add_action('future_event','publish_future_post_now');
}

function publish_future_post_now($id) {
// Set new post's post_status to "publish" rather than "future."
    wp_publish_post($id);
}

add_action('init', 'setup_future_hook');

This solution came from this SE question: Marking future dated post as published

A caveat with this approach

The caveat I will add is that this makes it more difficult to get a loop of just future posts. Before, I could simply use 'post_status' => 'future'; but now, since we've set future posts' post_status to published, that doesn't work.

To get around this you can use a posts_where filter on your loop (for example, see the date range examples on the codex here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Time_Parameters), or you can compare the current date to the post date, something like this:

    // get the event time
    $event_time = get_the_time('U', $post->ID);

    // get the current time
    $server_time = date('U');

    // if the event time is older than (less than)
    // the current time, do something
    if ( $server_time > $event_time ){
       // do something
    }

However, neither of these techniques is as easy as having a separate post_status for future posts. Perhaps a custom post_status would be a good solution here.

I would like to give my answer all this time later. In the case of making all the 'future' posts for the 'events' post type visible to the public, I found this solution:

add_filter('get_post_status', function($post_status, $post) {
    if ($post->post_type == 'events' && $post_status == 'future') {
        return "publish";
    }
    return $post_status;
}, 10, 2);