Turning Off, Archiving and Deleting a Feature Flag

A live flag has three ways down, and they are not the same. Turn off is the quick, reversible one. Archive retires the flag for good. Delete is for drafts only.

Turn off

Turn off is the main action at the top of a live flag's page while anyone can get On. It sends everyone to Off at once, and the confirmation says exactly that: "Everyone gets Off from now on. A running plan is paused."

• On your pages, the next page load serves Off.
• On your servers, the SDK answers Off within about 45 seconds.
• The rollout is now 0%, and the Library shows the flag as Off.
• A running plan is paused. The rollout stays at 0% until you raise it or resume the plan.

Turning off is reversible. Raise the rollout, or resume the plan, and visitors get On again. Because every visitor has a fixed bucket, the people who had On before are the ones who get it back.

You can also schedule it: Turn off at on the Schedule card turns the flag off at a set time, and pauses a running plan in the same way. See Rolling Out a Feature Flag.

Lowering the rollout, rather than turning off, moves only the visitors above the new share to Off. The rest keep On.

Archive

Archive is in the More options menu on the flag's page. An archived flag serves Off to everyone and cannot be turned on again. Its plan and schedule are cleared. Archive a flag when the change is built into the site, or when you have decided not to ship it.

Your code can keep asking for an archived flag's key: it answers Off, so nothing breaks while you remove the call. The key stays taken on the website, so a new flag cannot reuse it.

Delete

Delete, also in More options, removes a draft: "The draft and its settings are removed. This cannot be undone." A published flag cannot be deleted. Archive it instead. Deleting is for Admins and Owners.

Cleaning up

• For an editor flag, build the change into the site and archive the flag. Changes applied in the browser cost page speed on every load, and after 30 days at 100% Pertento reminds you. See Quick Fixes with Editor Flags.
• For a code flag at 100% that is staying, make the On path the only path in your code, remove the flag call, then archive the flag.
• For a code flag you turned off for good, remove the On path from your code and archive the flag.

The Activity tab

The Activity tab lists every publish, rollout change, plan step and turn off, with who made it. Changes the scheduler made, such as a scheduled publish or a plan moving to its next step, carry no name. It is the record to read when a rollout changed and nobody remembers doing it.

Changes made by hand are only on the Activity tab. Only what the scheduler or the guardrail did is also sent as a notification. See Notifications in Pertento.