I'm a big fan of the RStudio IDE for coding in R, but like all software it has one or two quirks. Someone recently asked about one on the Posit Community forum. It's one that has annoyed me a bit.
When editing certain kinds of files (Shiny applications, RMarkdown or Quarto documents, ...), the IDE gives you a drop-down menu to publish (or republish) the document. The menu lets you publish to an existing account or to define a new account and publish there. It lists accounts to which you previously published this app or document. There is also an option to clear the list of previous locations. Here comes the gripe: there is no option to delete selectively one or more previous locations from the list. All you can do is clear the entire list.
It turns out that you can partially but not completely winnow the list, but it takes a file browser or terminal/command prompt and a bit of exertion. Since I've only published Shiny apps, I'll document the steps for that. The process for a Quarto or RMarkdown document is presumably similar but perhaps not identical.
The first step is to navigate to the folder containing the document or application. It should contain a folder named "rsconnect", which is where you want to go next. In there, you should find a folder for each site (server) on which the app has been published. In each of those folders you should find a folder for each name/account under which the app was published on that server. Delete the folders corresponding to the locations you want to delete from the "republish" menu. If you are deleting locations on more than one server, repeat for each pertinent server folder.
For example, I wrote a Shiny application for a colleague to use in a course. The app is installed on shinyapps.io in two places, a paid account used by my colleague and my free developer account. The app files (ui.R and server.R -- it predates the option to use a single consolidated app.R file) live in file X on my PC. So I go there and drill down to X/rsconnect. Since both installations are on the same service, there is only one file there, X/rsconnect/shinyapps.io. Inside that folder are two folders, one bearing the name of the course account (call that A) and the other bearing the name of my developer account (call that B). If I want to remove just my developer account from the republish list, I delete folder X/rsconnect/shinyapps.io/B but leave A in place.
Note that this does not remove the app from any server on which it is current published. For that you need to log into the server and do something. On shinyapps.io, you find the app in your administrative panel, sleep it, archive it and then delete it.
