Remove redundant event data and metadata

[timrutter]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

During the development phase of my project numerous events have been posted some of which have had their name changed several times. When creating insights all of these events including the various change name variants are visible and its quite hard to see the event needed. There's no way I can see of removing the old events and associated metadata so that I can tidy this up.

Describe the solution you'd like

To be able to remove an event completely from a project so it no longer appears in drop downs.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Creating a new project would do the same thing but we'd lose all our data.

Additional context

Thank you for your feature request – we love each and every one!

[macobo]

cc @mariusandra as feature owner

[joesaunderson]

Also relevant to person metadata

https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/10776

[mariusandra]

I think @alexkim205 is the de-facto feature owner, having done a lot of work with calculated events, data management, etc.

@alexkim205 is this feature somewhere in your backlog?

[alexkim205]

Event deletion isn't something we're considering right now, but there were a few requests for it just in my support week alone. I think this is very related to removing related persons events when a person is deleted, in that the same considerations/edge cases apply. I'll put this in the backlog for data management but I think it realistically should be considered once that work is finished?

[clarkus]

Related https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/11128

[lsmith77]

I know it is not possible to remove individual events or events in bulk, then again in the persons tab it seems like I can delete of a specific person, so it seems fundamentally posthog architecture does allow deleting events or am I missing something?

[alexkim205]

Hey @lsmith77 good find! This was a really recent feature that @macobo added that allows you to delete events related to a team, person, or group. I'll be taking a stab at bulk/individual event deletion soon now that the async deletion work is released.

[bobmoff]

@alexkim205 have you made any progress on the bulk/individual event deletion ? it is kind of frustrating that any mistakes that would ever be made during my journey using posthog will be there in those dropdowns when i create insights.. forever. it would be very nice to be able to clean that up. i bet i am not alone in this feeling. i mean, this has to be something that every user will experience at some point.

this goes hand in hand with renaming and merging of events.

[davestewart]

I've just googled for this, and I'm really surprised this can't be done.

It's especially perplexing when you're prototyping your tracking schema and event and property names are changing as you realise your initial bets don't make much sense, or are somehow ambiguous in the dashboard.

At the moment as I've not released event tracking to production, I'm just deleting the project and creating a new one.

My other strategy is to log in to my app with a test user, get the naming right, then delete the user and data when I've settled on a schema for new tracking events, but as the docs say, events are not cleaned up until the following weekend, so you may have up to 7 days to wait for the cleanout (as such, I can't even verify this works at this point, unlike just nuking the project!)

Another strategy I guess would be to create two projects; one for development and one for production, so production never receives the spitballed event and property names.