Cancelling, restoring & duplicating events

Cancelling stops ticket sales immediately but deletes nothing — the event, its tickets, and every buyer record stay put. Know this before you cancel: Platypus does not refund your buyers and does not tell them anything. The cancellation changes the public page and blocks checkout; contacting and refunding ticket holders happens outside the platform, and it's on you.

Cancelling a published event

Open Events and choose Cancel event from the event's row menu. You must give a reason. It's shown publicly on the event page, so write it for your audience ("Cast illness — Saturday's performance will not go ahead"). The confirmation spells out what Platypus won't do: notify your buyers, or refund them.

The moment you confirm:

• The Buy tickets button disappears and checkout refuses the event. A buyer mid-checkout is told the event has been cancelled and gets no tickets; anyone who already paid keeps their order and tickets unchanged.
• Scheduled reminder emails for the event stop going out.
• At the door, a scanned ticket for it shows Cancelled performance (see Door check-in).

You can't flip the status back in the edit form. A cancelled event's record page is view-only; the recovery actions below are the only ways out.

Refunds and emailing ticket holders

Platypus never moves money back. Ticket payments went straight to your own Stripe account (see Stripe payments), so issue refunds from your Stripe dashboard.

Platypus also never emails buyers about a cancellation. Do it yourself, promptly: the event's Tickets details page shows a warning banner with a direct link to a pre-filled Email ticket holders campaign addressed to everyone who bought a ticket. The same action sits in the event's row menu whenever the event has paid sales.

What stays public — and hiding it

A cancelled event stays on your public events listing until its date passes: clearly marked Cancelled, muted, with no price and no way to buy. Its card still links to the detail page, which shows a cancellation notice with your recorded reason. It is never featured as the Next performance. Once the date passes, it drops off like any other past event.

If you'd rather it vanish sooner, the event's archive row offers Hide from public site: the event leaves the listing and the API, and the row gains a Hidden marker. One limit: the detail page itself stays reachable by direct link, still showing the cancellation notice, so anyone holding the URL can read what happened. Show on public site reverses it. The toggle exists only for cancelled events, and every use is written to your audit log.

Restoring (and rescheduling)

On the archive row (its main action reads View cancelled event) or the record page's danger zone, press Restore event. The event returns to draft, the cancellation reason and timestamp are cleared, and the fully editable form opens. Republish whenever you're ready. The event reappears publicly with no trace of the cancellation.

Rescheduling is exactly this: restore, change the date, republish. Restoring also resets public visibility to shown, so if you cancel again later the event starts visible again.

Duplicating

Duplicate event builds a fresh draft copy: title, category, date and time, description, location, image and settings flags, plus each ticket type copied as an unpublished draft. The copy gets a new web address, and none of the old sales come with it — no tickets, no buyer data, and none of the event's discounts. A multi-date event's individual stops are not copied; re-add the dates you need. You land straight on the new draft's edit page.

Restore when it's the same show moving; duplicate when you want the cancelled event left intact as a record and a clean slate to sell from.

Cancelling a single date

For an event with multiple dates you can cancel one stop on its own, with its own required reason, and leave the rest selling:

• The other dates are untouched; if the cancelled stop was next up, your public listing date moves on to the next scheduled one.
• On the public page the stop shows struck through with its reason and no buy button, and checkout refuses it. Its sold tickets are kept, paid holders keep theirs, and no reminder is sent for it.
• If the stop has paid sales, you're prompted to email only that date's ticket holders.

Refunds for a cancelled date are your responsibility, same as a full cancellation. A cancelled stop can be restored to scheduled later, which clears its reason.

Deleting vs cancelling

Cancelling is the normal path for a show that won't happen — it keeps the record, the tickets, and the audit trail. It's also the only path off sale once tickets exist: a published event with ticket sales can't be reverted to draft (the editor replaces the publish toggle with a notice, and the server refuses the change), so unpublishing can never silently strand ticket holders. Delete event is a hard delete: permanent, non-recoverable, and only available when the event has no paid sales and no checkout in progress (long-expired checkout holds don't block it). Paid sales always block deletion. Cancel instead.

Deleting makes you type the event's exact title to confirm, and the server rejects a mismatch independently of the form. The dividing line: if anyone has ever paid, you cancel; delete is for mistakes and events that never sold.

If an event behaves in a way this page doesn't describe (still selling after a cancel, for instance), that's a bug — email support@platypus.tickets.