Deleting a conversation is a two-stage process, and knowing that matters if somebody has asked you to erase their data.
What happens when you delete
Open the conversation and delete it. Immediately:
- It leaves the inbox and stops appearing in any view.
- It is no longer readable by anyone through the admin.
Then, after the retention window — 30 days by default — it is permanently purged from the database by a scheduled job, along with its messages.
So “deleted” means gone from view now, and gone from disk later. For a deletion request under GDPR or similar, the second stage is the one that satisfies the request, and it is worth knowing the window rather than assuming it was instant.
Visitors can delete their own
A visitor can delete their chat from the widget itself. It follows exactly the same path: out of the inbox at once, purged after the same window.
Why anonymous chats have to be deleted this way
WordPress’s Tools → Erase Personal Data works by matching an email address. For a signed-in visitor that works fine, and Sohay’s conversations are included in the standard export and erase flows.
An anonymous visitor has no email address attached, so those tools cannot find their conversation. Deleting it from the inbox is how you erase it — that is the mechanism, not a workaround.
Changing the retention window
The window is filterable:
add_filter( 'sohaychat_retention_days', function () {
return 7;
} );
Shorter is a stronger privacy position and costs you the ability to recover something deleted by mistake. Longer gives you a bigger safety margin and keeps personal data on disk longer than you may want to defend.
Whatever you choose, make sure your privacy policy says the same number.
What deletion does not touch
Knowledge Base articles are ordinary WordPress content and are unaffected. Deleting conversations never touches them.
Where to go next
How long conversations are kept for the retention job in detail, and Exporting and erasing visitor data for the GDPR tooling.
