Terms of Service

01 Using Ani

By adding Ani to a Discord server, running its commands, or signing into its dashboard, you're agreeing to these terms and to Discord's own Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. If you don't agree with any of this, don't use the bot — no hard feelings, no follow-up.

Adding the bot to a server is a decision made by whoever has permission to invite it. Everyone else in that server can then use its commands without a separate agreement, because the bot operates as part of the server itself.

02 What you can't do with it

The short list of things that will get a user or a server removed from the bot:

• Spam or abuse. Hammering commands to flood a channel, using the bot to harass other users, or anything that makes the bot a tool for griefing rather than a tool for anime.
• Exploiting the bot. Attempting to reverse-engineer, exploit, or find bugs specifically to break the service — including the API, the dashboard, or the bot process itself.
• Overloading it. Deliberately sending requests faster than the rate limits allow, or in a way designed to degrade service for everyone else.
• Breaking Discord's rules through it. Anything that would violate Discord's Terms or Community Guidelines if done manually, done through the bot instead — using it to spam other servers, for example, or to distribute content Discord doesn't allow.

Server admins are responsible for how Ani is configured and used in their own server. If someone in a server uses the bot to do something that violates these terms, the server can be removed from the bot the same as an individual user can.

03 Moderation tools

The bot includes moderation commands — kick, ban, purge, and so on — that require Discord permissions to run. These commands act on real Discord accounts and are not reversible by the bot. If you kick or ban someone using the bot, the bot can't undo it.

Using these tools is entirely at the discretion of whoever runs them, and Ani takes no responsibility for what a server admin chooses to do with them. The permissions are checked before every command fires, and anyone who shouldn't be able to run them won't be able to. But "shouldn't" and "can" aren't the same thing when it comes to moderation mistakes — that's on the human running the command, not the bot.

04 The dashboard

Signing into dash.anibot.org gives you the ability to change a server's configured settings — welcome messages, news sources, prefix, and so on. Only servers where you have Manage Server or Administrator permission and the bot is already a member are accessible through it.

Whatever you save through the dashboard takes effect in Discord immediately. There's no staging or preview step once you hit Save — the bot picks up the new settings on its next check. If you configure something that turns out to be unwanted, the way back is to configure it again, not to contact anyone for a rollback.

05 Uptime and availability

Ani runs on a single machine, operated by one person, with no promise of uptime. It goes down when the machine restarts, when Discord's API has a bad day, when a dependency pushes a breaking change, or when something urgent comes up in the operator's real life.

Features can be paused, changed, or removed at any time without notice. The bot might go into maintenance mode, sit idle for hours, or be rebuilt from the ground up between one week and the next. None of this is out of the ordinary — it's how a small free project operates.

If a feature being temporarily missing is something your server can't tolerate, Ani isn't the right tool for that server.

06 No warranty

Ani is not a service with a support contract behind it. It's a hobby project that's been kept running because people find it useful, and it can be stopped at any time for any reason. Using it means accepting that possibility.

07 Limitation of liability

Ani is offered free of charge. In exchange, the person running it takes no responsibility for anything that happens as a result of using it — including, but not limited to, lost data, missed messages, botched moderation actions, downtime during something important, or any other damage of any kind.

Use of the bot is entirely at your own discretion. If something goes wrong and you need to get information back, the fastest path is the support server — but there's no guarantee any specific piece of data is recoverable.

08 Changes to these terms

These terms can be updated at any time. When they are, the new version lands on this page and the change gets noted on the Updates page. Continuing to use the bot after a change means accepting the updated terms.

The important one: nothing here is going to get more restrictive in a way that would retroactively make past use a problem. If anything, the whole document gets simplified whenever it's revisited, not expanded.

09 Getting removed

Access to the bot can be revoked for any server or user at any time, with or without a stated reason. In practice this happens for one of three reasons: a report of abuse, an attempt to exploit the bot, or the user or server having done something severe enough that keeping the bot available isn't worth the risk.

If a server is removed, the bot leaves and its stored settings are wiped — same as if the bot had been kicked manually. If a user is removed, their commands stop working everywhere the bot is present. Both of these are reversible if the situation gets resolved, by asking in the support server.

10 Contact

The only place these terms are ever discussed, changed, or clarified is the support server. If something here reads wrong, doesn't match how the bot actually behaves, or just needs a straight answer — that's where to say it.