Use Pro not kept after disabling/enabling

Thanks for the report. This is by design, currently, but I’ll open an issue to reconsider that design.

The default setting is not to use Pro. When you deactivate the plugin, it cleans up after itself in the WordPress database, which includes removing its settings in the database.

Would your preference be that a plugin like this leave a permanent trace of its previous settings in your WordPress db? (Trade-off: you wouldn’t have an easy way to clean it up later if you actually wanted to remove such orphaned data.)

Or would you prefer that the settings be retained “for a while” before automatically being cleaned up? (This would allow you do enable/disable within that window of time and it would remember its settings, but it would also eventually clean up after itself–and only then “forget” those prior settings.)

Or something else?

Sometimes you disable a plugin for testing purposes, when you renable it you expect to keep the same settings as before.

That’s how most of other plugins work?

Yes, that’s a good reminder. I agree: it’s common to activate/de-activate a plugin when troubleshooting WordPress problems.

As one who’s managed a WordPress site with lots of plugins over years, it bothers me personally to think that plugins and themes are cluttering up the WordPress database with old/unused data, especially when options are sometimes auto-loaded (so they may cause a wasteful bloating of memory usage as well as disk usage as all of that unused data accumulates).

But I can see that we need to strike a better balance between real-world usage convenience and data hygiene.

You can add an option to uninstall the plugin. There are plugins that do so.

I’ve fixed this for the next release of the plugin. Deactivating will not remove option settings in the database. Uninstalling after deactivating will trigger a database clean up.

You’re right, I had wrongly confused the deactivation of a plugin with its uninstallation, with respect to when various states should be cleaned up or reset.