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Privacy, Data and Uninstall

This page is for site administrators and anyone responsible for privacy at your organisation. It explains what personal information Course Cadence stores, how to answer a data export or erasure request, how old records are cleaned up automatically, and exactly what happens when you deactivate or delete the plugin.

Everything described here needs the WordPress Administrator role. Course Cadence does not give trainers or students any access to stored records beyond their own preferences.

What Course Cadence stores

All data is stored in your own WordPress database. Nothing is sent to an analytics or tracking service, and the plugin sets no cookies.

The plugin’s own tables

The plugin creates six tables (each name starts with your database prefix, usually wp_):

Table	What it holds	Personal information
`dcc_timelines`	Each course’s timeline: type, start and end dates, breaks, and whether email delivery is paused	None
`dcc_prompts`	The weekly guidance content: subject, body, audience, week, attachments and linked lessons	None (unless an author types it into the content)
`dcc_prompt_edits`	Trainer edit suggestions: the suggested text, the reason, the status, who suggested it, who reviewed it and any review note	Trainer and reviewer user IDs, suggestion text and notes
`dcc_prompt_versions`	A snapshot of a prompt taken before each change, used for version history and rollback	The user ID of whoever made each change
`dcc_emails_sent`	The email delivery log: one record per prompt delivered to a person, with the course, week, time, status (sent, failed, or dismissed catch-up), retry count and last error	The recipient’s user ID. No email address or email content is stored
`dcc_audit_log`	The audit log of administrative actions	The user ID of whoever acted, plus details of the change

Shared class tables (standalone mode)

When Course Cadence manages its own classes (no LMS), it uses two tables shared with the Dantian Training Hub plugin: dthub_classes (class name, short code, year, status, notes) and dthub_class_members (which users belong to which class, their role in it, and when they were added). The plugin creates these tables on activation. If Training Hub is active, Training Hub owns this data and its own privacy tools cover it. See Integration with Training Hub.

User preferences

Two values are stored against individual user accounts:

Trainer view mode — whether a trainer last chose the Week by Week or All Upcoming layout of the trainer guidance page.
Guidance email opt-out — which courses a student has opted out of guidance emails for (set on the email preferences page; see Email Preferences).

Settings and temporary data

Your settings are stored as WordPress options whose names start with dcc_. The only personal detail they may contain is the Digest Recipient Email address (Settings → Emails). Short-lived cached values (for example, the count behind the “N behind” menu badge) are stored as WordPress transients.

If your site has WordPress debug logging switched on, the plugin writes diagnostic lines to the debug log. Email addresses in those lines are masked (for example j***@example.com).

What the plugin does not store

Course Cadence does not keep copies of the emails it sends, and it does not store email addresses in its tables — it looks them up from the WordPress user account at the moment of sending. It does not create or delete WordPress user accounts, and it does not change course enrolments in your LMS.

External connections

The WordPress.org copy of the plugin makes no outbound connections at all — no licence check, telemetry or analytics.
The copy downloaded directly from the Dantian store includes an update checker. When WordPress checks for plugin updates, it contacts the store (studio.dantianhealth.com.au) and sends your site address, your WordPress and PHP versions, the installed plugin version and the free product’s licence key, so it can offer and download new versions. No student, trainer or course data is sent.

Telling people about it

Privacy policy text. Course Cadence adds a ready-made section titled “Dantian Course Cadence” to the WordPress privacy policy guide (Settings → Privacy, then open the policy guide). It covers the delivery log, trainer suggestions, the two preferences, the activity log, version history and, in standalone mode, class membership — and states that no data is shared with third parties. Copy it into your privacy policy and adjust it to suit your organisation.

What students see. The email preferences page includes a collapsible How we use this data note telling students that the plugin records when each guidance email is sent to them (course and week) to prevent duplicate sends, and how many days that record is kept. The number comes straight from your Log Retention Period setting, so it stays accurate if you change it.

Personal data export and erasure

Course Cadence connects to the standard WordPress privacy tools, so you handle requests the same way as for the rest of your site. It appears in both tools as Dantian Course Cadence. Requests are matched by email address to a WordPress user account; an address with no account returns nothing.

Exporting a person’s data

Go to Tools → Export Personal Data.
Enter the person’s email address or username and click Send Request.
Once the request is confirmed (or you choose to skip confirmation), click Download personal data (or Send export link).

The export contains these groups when the person has data in them:

Group	Contents
Guidance Prompt Edits	Each suggestion they submitted: Edit ID, Prompt ID, suggested subject, suggested body, reason, status, submitted at
Guidance Prompt Edit Reviews	Each suggestion they reviewed: Prompt ID, review decision, review note, reviewed at
Guidance Email Delivery Log	Each delivery record: Course ID, week number, sent at
Guidance Preferences	Trainer view mode, and their guidance email opt-outs (“Opted out of guidance emails for course ID(s): 12, 15” or “Subscribed to guidance emails for all courses”)
Guidance Activity Log	Each audit entry for their actions: action, entity type, entity ID, recorded at
Guidance Prompt Version History	Each prompt version they created: Prompt ID, version number, subject, recorded at
Class / Cohort Membership	(Standalone mode only) Class ID, role in class, added at

Times in the export are stored in UTC.

Erasing a person’s data

Go to Tools → Erase Personal Data.
Enter the person’s email address or username and click Send Request.
Once the request is confirmed, click Erase personal data.

What Course Cadence does with each kind of data:

Data	On erasure
Edit suggestions they submitted	Deleted
Their email delivery records (sent, failed and dismissed)	Deleted
Trainer view mode and guidance email opt-out	Deleted
Their class memberships (standalone mode only)	Deleted
Audit log entries for their actions	Anonymised — kept, with the person’s identity removed. They then show as System in the log.
Prompt versions they authored	Anonymised — the version content is kept, the author is removed
Reviews they made of others’ suggestions	Anonymised — the reviewer identity and review note are removed; the suggestion itself is kept

When anything is anonymised, WordPress shows a message such as “Guidance activity-log entries were anonymised (the user identifier was removed) to preserve the integrity of the security audit trail.” and counts those rows as retained. This is deliberate: once the identity is removed the record is no longer personal information, and keeping it preserves the audit trail and the ability to roll back prompt content.

Erasure does not delete the WordPress user account or the person’s LMS enrolments.

Erase only after the person has left the course. The delivery records are how Course Cadence knows who has already received each week. If you erase the data of a student who is still enrolled, the plugin no longer knows what they have received, so they can be flagged as needing catch-up emails and may be sent past weeks again. Remove the student from the course (or class) first.

Automatic log cleanup

The delivery log and the audit log are cleaned up automatically, once a day.

Location: Course Cadence → Settings → System tab → Data Retention section (“Control how long email delivery and audit log records are kept. Records older than the configured period are automatically removed once per day.”).

Setting	What it does	Default	Allowed values
Log Retention Period	Email delivery log and audit log records older than this number of days are purged automatically.	365 days	30 to 3650. A lower number is saved as 30; a higher number as 3650.

How it works:

A daily scheduled task removes every delivery record (sent, failed or dismissed) and every audit-log entry older than the retention period. The cut-off is calculated in UTC.
The first cleanup runs when the plugin is activated, then roughly every 24 hours after that. Like all WordPress scheduled tasks it runs when the site receives a visit — see Scheduled Tasks, Site Health and the Audit Log.
Timelines, prompts, prompt version history, trainer suggestions and your settings are not affected.
Removed records cannot be recovered except from a database backup.

Choosing a period. Keep the retention period longer than your longest-running course. The delivery log is what stops a week being sent twice and what the plugin checks to find students who are behind; if records for a still-running course are purged, older weeks can show as missed. For example, a 12-month course with a mid-year intake should keep at least 365 days; an 18-month traineeship should keep around 600. If your organisation must keep delivery evidence for audit purposes for a set number of years, set the period to match (up to 3650 days, about 10 years) — the student-facing note updates automatically.

Uninstalling

There are two separate steps in WordPress, and they do different things.

Deactivating

Plugins → Installed Plugins → Deactivate. This stops all of Course Cadence’s scheduled tasks — the weekly dispatch, hourly retries, daily cleanup, the dispatch preview and late-dispatch check, and any catch-up emails queued for newly enrolled students. No data is deleted. Reactivating restores the schedule using your saved settings. Students receive nothing while the plugin is deactivated, and any catch-up emails that were queued at the time are not re-queued.

Deleting the plugin

Plugins → Installed Plugins → Delete (after deactivating). What is removed depends on one setting.

Location: Course Cadence → Settings → System tab → Remove All Data on Uninstall — a checkbox labelled “Delete all plugin data when the plugin is uninstalled”. Default: unticked.

Always removed, whatever the setting:

All of the plugin’s scheduled tasks (including any left over from older versions).
All of the plugin’s temporary cached values.

Kept when the box is unticked (the default): everything else — timelines, prompts, version history, suggestions, delivery and audit logs, user preferences and settings. Reinstalling the plugin picks up exactly where you left off.

Removed when the box is ticked:

The six plugin tables listed above, with all their data.
Every plugin setting (all options starting with dcc_, including the Remove All Data setting itself).
The trainer view mode and guidance email opt-out values from every user account.
The shared class tables (dthub_classes and dthub_class_members, plus older tables from early versions named tam_classes and tam_class_members) and their version setting — but only if the Dantian Training Hub plugin is not installed. If Training Hub is installed, even if it is deactivated, these tables are left alone because Training Hub may still need them; Training Hub’s own uninstall deals with them.

Never removed: WordPress user accounts, your LMS courses and enrolments, Training Hub’s own data, and emails already delivered to people’s inboxes.

On a multisite network, the uninstall runs on every site. Each site’s data is removed only if that site ticked Remove All Data on Uninstall; scheduled tasks and cached values are removed on every site.

Steps to remove everything

Take a full database backup — removal cannot be undone.
If you need records for your files, first export what you need (for example an export for a specific person, or a database export of the dcc_ tables).
Go to Course Cadence → Settings → System, tick Remove All Data on Uninstall and click Save Settings.
Go to Plugins, deactivate Dantian Course Cadence, then click Delete.

If the plugin files have already been deleted without the box ticked, reinstall and activate the plugin, then follow the steps above.

Troubleshooting

The export has nothing from Dantian Course Cadence. The email address does not belong to a WordPress user account, or that person has no suggestions, deliveries, preferences, log entries or versions. Check the user exists under Users.
The erasure says items were retained. This is expected: audit-log entries, prompt versions and reviews are anonymised rather than deleted (see the table above). WordPress shows the explanation messages with the result.
A student keeps appearing as behind after an erasure. They are still enrolled, so the plugin treats their past weeks as not received. Remove them from the course, or Dismiss them in the catch-up panel (Catch-Up Emails).
Data was still there after I deleted the plugin. Remove All Data on Uninstall was not ticked (it is off by default). Reinstall, tick it, save, then deactivate and delete again.
The class tables are still there after uninstalling. Dantian Training Hub is installed on the site (active or not), so the shared tables were deliberately kept.
Delivery history only goes back a few months. Older records were removed by automatic cleanup. Increase the Log Retention Period; records already removed can only be recovered from a backup.

Worked example

A registered training organisation (RTO) running a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment over 12 months, using Tutor LMS.

Setting up: the compliance officer copies the “Dantian Course Cadence” text from Settings → Privacy into the RTO’s privacy policy and adds a sentence explaining the weekly guidance emails. Because the RTO keeps learner records for audit, they set Log Retention Period to 1095 days (three years). The email preferences page now tells students their delivery log is kept for 1095 days.
A former student asks for their data: the officer runs Tools → Export Personal Data for the student’s email address. The download includes a Guidance Email Delivery Log listing each course ID, week number and send time, and Guidance Preferences showing one opted-out course.
The same student asks to be forgotten after finishing: they have already been unenrolled, so the officer runs Tools → Erase Personal Data. Their delivery records and preferences are deleted; nothing else about them existed in Course Cadence.
A trainer who left the RTO asks for erasure: their suggestions are deleted, and the audit-log entries, prompt versions and reviews they made are anonymised and kept. WordPress shows the explanation messages, and the trainer’s past audit entries now show as System.
Moving to a new system three years later: the RTO takes a backup, ticks Remove All Data on Uninstall, saves, and deletes the plugin. All Course Cadence tables, settings and user preferences are removed; Tutor LMS courses and user accounts are untouched.

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