HappenBoard stores personal data as soon as somebody signs up for an event. This guide covers what it keeps, how it answers a data request, and what happens to all of it when you delete the plugin.
What is stored about an attendee
A sign-up row holds the person’s name and email address, the event they signed up for, their status, how many places they took, the date they signed up, and any answers your sign-up form asked for. It also holds a cancellation token, which is a one-way hash used to let somebody cancel their own place from a link.
Answering a data request
HappenBoard plugs into the tools WordPress already provides, so there is nothing HappenBoard-specific to learn. Both live under Tools and both start with the person’s email address.
- Tools → Export Personal Data produces a file including a HappenBoard section covering RSVPs and tickets.
- Tools → Erase Personal Data runs the erasure described below.
What the export contains
One entry per sign-up, listing:
- The event, by title and ID.
- The name given at sign-up.
- The email address.
- The status of the sign-up.
- The number of places.
- The sign-up date, in UTC.
- Every custom form answer, each on its own labelled line rather than as one unreadable blob.
Erasure anonymises rather than deletes
This is the part worth understanding before you run it. HappenBoard does not delete the sign-up row. It scrubs the personal parts of it: the email becomes a placeholder address, the name becomes a deletion marker, and the custom answers are removed outright.
The row itself survives, keeping which event it belonged to, its status and how many places it took. That is deliberate. Those three values are what capacity and remaining places are calculated from, so deleting the row would silently free up seats at an event that was genuinely full, and quietly rewrite the attendance history of events that already happened.
WordPress reports the result as records retained rather than removed, along with a message saying how many were anonymised. That wording is accurate and expected; nothing has gone wrong.
Downloading the attendee list in bulk is reserved for administrators, for the same reason. See the roles and permissions guide.
Uninstalling without losing everything
Deleting the plugin from Plugins removes nothing of yours. Your events, venues, organizers, attendees and settings all stay in the database, so reinstalling brings you back exactly where you left off. Deactivating changes nothing either.
That is on purpose. Wiping years of calendar history because somebody clicked Delete would be the wrong default.
Removing the data deliberately
If you genuinely want everything gone, you opt in first. Add this line to your wp-config.php before deleting the plugin:
define( 'HAPPENBOARD_UNINSTALL', true );
Then delete HappenBoard from the Plugins screen. With the line in place, deleting the plugin removes:
- Every event, venue and organizer, with all of their stored fields.
- Every HappenBoard category and tag.
- The plugin’s options and widget options.
- Its temporary cached values.
- Its database tables: occurrences, attendees, bookings, availability rules and the agent audit log.
- Its scheduled tasks.
- The HappenBoard permissions, stripped from every role.
Extensions clean up their own data in the same pass, so a single uninstall covers Pro as well. On a multisite network the cleanup runs once per site.
Back up before you do this. At minimum, export your events and settings from the tools described in the CSV and settings backup guide, and take a database backup as well. None of this is reversible.