Privacy Policy

01 What gets stored

Ani stores the minimum it needs to function. Everything below is tied to a Discord ID — a long number Discord assigns to every server, channel and user — and nothing else.

• Server IDs and channel IDs — so the bot knows where commands are being run and where to post things.
• User IDs — so the bot can attribute settings and messages to the right person.
• Per-server settings — the things you configure from the dashboard: welcome / goodbye / boost messages, prefix, which channels get which news feeds, and the image-card customizer settings.
• AFK status — your user ID, the reason you set, the original nickname the bot needs to restore, and a timestamp, kept only while you're marked AFK.
• News deduplication state — a set of article IDs that have already been posted, so the same story doesn't repeat.

02 What doesn't get stored

• Message contents. The bot reads a message only to see if it starts with the server's configured prefix. If it doesn't, the message is discarded immediately. Nothing about your messages is written to disk.
• Voice data. When theme music plays in a voice channel, audio goes through the bot as a live stream and is never saved.
• Your Discord password, email, or anything sensitive. The bot can't see them and wouldn't have anywhere to put them.
• Anything you don't tell it. There's no telemetry, no analytics, no third-party trackers on the site or in the bot.

03 Where it lives

All stored data lives on the server that runs the bot, in plain JSON files. It's not synced to a database service, not replicated to a cloud provider, and not visible to anyone except whoever operates the bot.

The bot makes automatic backups every twenty minutes, kept on the same machine. That means there might be up to a few copies of a given file at any moment — all of them on the same host, all of them in the same storage.

04 Third-party services

Some commands talk to outside services to fetch information. In every case, only the minimum needed to answer the request leaves the bot.

• MyAnimeList / Jikan — anime and manga search, season data, schedule. Only your search term goes out.
• AniList — additional anime, manga and character lookups. Only your search term goes out.
• Kitsu — supplementary metadata for some lookups. Only your search term goes out.
• MangaDex — manga lookups. Only your search term goes out.
• Reddit — meme commands pull from r/animemes. No user information is sent, the bot is just fetching the public feed.
• YouTube (via yt-dlp) — theme search and audio streaming. Only the search query goes out.
• Discord — the bot uses Discord's API for everything it does in your server. What Discord does with that is governed by Discord's own privacy policy, not this one.

None of these services are told who you are, which server you're in, or that a specific person triggered the request. They just see "someone asked for this title."

05 The dashboard login

Signing into dash.anibot.org uses Discord's OAuth flow — you authorise the dashboard to see your basic Discord profile and the list of servers you're in. Discord gives the dashboard a token which is stored in a secure, HTTP-only cookie on your browser. It is not stored on the bot's server.

That token is used only to fetch your guild list and verify you have permission to change a server's settings. It's never logged, shared, or used for anything else. Logging out clears the cookie immediately.

The dashboard can only see servers where you have Manage Server or Administrator permission and the bot is already a member. It cannot see, join, or act on any other server in your list.

06 Who can see your data

The bot is operated by one person in their spare time. Nobody else has access to the files it stores. Data isn't sold, shared, rented, or handed to advertisers, and there is no "business partner" this could ever be handed to.

The only outside party that can see a server's configured settings is a user who has Manage Server or Administrator permission on that specific server — they'd already be able to change those settings from the dashboard anyway, so nothing new is exposed.

07 Removing your data

You don't have to email anyone or file a request. All of these work instantly:

• Kicking the bot from a server — the bot detects the removal and deletes that server's settings, news subscriptions, AFK entries, and announcement channel registration on its own. Nothing lingers.
• Clearing your AFK status — sending any message in the server you were marked AFK in removes your entry. The bot only stores it while you're marked away.
• Turning a feature off in the dashboard — the saved message, images, and embeds for that specific feature get cleared the next time you save.

For anything else — an old user ID you want purged, a setting that didn't clear, or a general "please forget I exist" — ask in the support server and it gets handled directly.

08 Age and consent

The bot operates inside Discord, and Discord requires users to meet its own minimum age for the region they're in. Ani inherits that — if you're old enough to have a Discord account, you're old enough to use the bot.

Adding the bot to a server implies consent from whoever added it. Users in that server can use its commands without any separate opt-in, and can have their data cleared per section 7 any time.

09 If something changes

If this policy ever changes in a way that affects what's stored or who can see it, that change lands on this page first and gets noted on the Updates page. The bot won't retroactively start storing something new without saying so here.

10 Questions

The fastest way to get a straight answer about anything on this page is the support server. Ask in general chat — you'll get a real reply, not a boilerplate one.