Privacy Policy

The controller for the processing described in this policy, within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR, is:

Controller

Youri Hoffmann

Address

c/o Block Services, Stuttgarter Str. 106, 70736 Fellbach, Germany

Email

privacy@ruination-bots.com

Data protection officer

We are not required to appoint one under Art. 37 GDPR / § 38 BDSG and have not done so. Please direct all privacy enquiries to the address above; they are handled by the operator personally.

This matters more here than on a typical website, because the same platform handles two very different kinds of data.

• If you have an account with us - you signed in with Discord to run bots - we are the controller for your account data. The sections on your account, your preferences, your bots and our logs describe that processing, and your rights are exercised against us.
• If you are a member of a Discord server that runs one of our customers' bots, we are only a processor. The operator of that bot decides what is collected and why; we merely store and process it on their instructions. The section on data your bots process about Discord members describes what that involves, and requests about that data must go to the bot operator, not to us. We will forward any that reach us, and assist the operator in answering them.

There is no password and no registration form. You sign in with Discord (OAuth 2.0). We receive from Discord only what that authorisation grants: your Discord user ID, your username and display name, your avatar and your email address. We never receive your Discord password.

When you choose a dashboard language or decide which emails you want, we store that choice against your account so it follows you between devices, together with the time you last changed it.

Product and promotional emails (new features, tips and reminders, offers and announcements) need your consent, and Art. 7(1) GDPR requires us to be able to prove it. So each time you switch one of them on or off, we add an entry to a consent record that is never edited afterwards: which email, whether you gave or withdrew consent, when, where (the onboarding question or your settings), the version of the wording you were shown and its language. Deleting your account counts as withdrawing every consent and is recorded the same way.

So that the record can still be matched to a complaint after your account is gone, each entry also holds a keyed one-way hash of your email address. It cannot be turned back into the address; it only tells us, if someone gives us an address, whether that address agreed. The record holds no address, no IP address and no message text.

Data

Interface language, email opt-in flags, time of the last change, whether onboarding was completed, when you first added a bot; for product and promotional email, the consent record described above.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR for the interface language; Art. 6(1)(a) and Art. 7(1) GDPR for the email consent record; Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR for keeping the record after you withdraw or delete your account: our legitimate interest is being able to show that we only emailed people who agreed, and to defend a claim that we did not (Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR).

Kept

The preferences until the account is deleted. A consent and its withdrawal until the end of the third calendar year after the withdrawal, which is when a claim about an email sent before it becomes time-barred (§§ 195, 199 BGB): withdrawn in May 2026, deleted in January 2030. Deleting your account does not shorten this.

To run a bot for you we store the bot's Discord application ID, its name and avatar, the servers it is connected to and their names and icons, its status and error history, and everything you configure: modules, commands, automatic replies, panels, giveaways, scheduled messages, alerts and so on. Where you name or address a Discord user in that configuration, that identifier is stored with it.

Your bot token is stored encrypted and is never displayed back to you, never logged and never sent to your browser. We keep a one-way hash of it separately so that the same token cannot be registered twice.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR - we cannot run the bot you asked us to run without it.

Kept

Until you delete the bot or your account. Deleting a bot removes its configuration and its token. One part expires on its own: the bot's incident history - when it went down, was restarted and recovered - is deleted after 90 days.

Every change made through the dashboard is recorded so that a bot owner can see who changed what, and when. An entry contains the acting account, the action, the affected bot and object, the outcome, the browser user agent and a hash of the IP address rather than the address itself. Refused actions are recorded too - an audit log that only shows successes hides exactly the events worth looking for.

Separately, when our own staff act on your account - set a plan by hand, suspend or reinstate a bot, or handle a bug report or suggestion you sent - we record which staff member did what, to which bot or report, when, and the reason given. Only our staff can see this record. It is deleted after 365 days. If you delete the bot, the report or your account sooner, the bot's name, the report's title and the link to your account are removed from it immediately; what remains for the rest of that period is the action, its time and its reason, so that a complaint about a decision can still be answered.

Audit entries are deleted automatically after 90 days. Our hosting providers keep short-lived server logs containing IP addresses and request metadata for the operation and security of the service, for at most 30 days. This happens whenever a page is served, whether or not you have an account.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is the security and traceability of a service where several people can hold administrative access to the same bot, and, for the staff record, being able to show what our staff did and why. We weighed this against your interests and reduced it accordingly: IP addresses are hashed rather than stored, request bodies are never logged, and everything expires automatically.

Kept

90 days for audit entries; 365 days for the record of staff actions; at most 30 days for server logs.

We use Google Analytics to understand how this website is used and which visits lead to a sign-up or a purchase, and only if you agree in the cookie banner. Until you do, nothing is loaded from Google, no cookie of Google's is set and no request is sent to Google. We use no advertising networks, no tracking pixels and no advertising profiles: Google's advertising features (Google Signals, ads personalisation, remarketing) are switched off, and our Analytics property is not linked to any advertising product.

If you accept, Google's script runs on our public pages only: the home page, the setup guide, our pages about individual features, the legal pages and the sign-in page. It records a pseudonymous identifier stored in a cookie, the pages you view, the page you came from, your device, browser and language, and your approximate location (country and region), which Google derives from your IP address. According to Google, Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses, and data from devices in the EU is collected on servers in the EU. The page addresses we report have their query strings removed, except campaign labels (utm_…).

Google's script never runs in the signed-in area. Instead, if you have accepted, our own server reports five events to Google Analytics under the same pseudonymous identifier: account created, bot added, trial started, checkout opened and plan purchased (the last two with the plan and the billing period). It sends no email address, no account ID, no bot name or ID and not your IP address, and we do not store which account an analytics identifier belongs to.

This data is pseudonymous, not anonymous: Google can recognise the same browser again for as long as the cookie exists.

Recipient

Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, which processes the data on our behalf under Google's data processing terms (Art. 28 GDPR). That is the contractual position; German supervisory authorities have also described website operators and Google as jointly responsible. Either way you can exercise every right in this policy with us.

Legal basis

Your consent: § 25(1) TDDDG for storing and reading the cookies, and Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR for the processing. Consent is voluntary; the website works the same without it.

Outside the EU

Google may process the data at its parent, Google LLC, in the United States. See transfers outside the EU/EEA.

Kept

Google deletes user-level and event-level data after 2 months, the shortest period it offers. The cookies last at most 6 months; see the table under cookies.

Withdrawing

At any time, with effect for the future, under Cookie settings at the bottom of every page. Google's cookies are then deleted from your browser and nothing further is sent. Your choice, either way, is remembered for 6 months, after which we ask again.

Separately from this, and without any third party: inside the dashboard we show member counts, message volumes, joins and leaves per bot per day. These are aggregate counters, not records of individuals: no message content and no individual identifiers are stored in them.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR - the statistics are part of the product you signed up for.

Kept

400 days per daily figure, and never longer than the bot exists. The same period applies on every plan; your plan only sets how far back the dashboard shows.

Independently of Google Analytics and without your consent being needed, our own server counts how many people are on this website at the moment, so that we can see it on an internal screen. It does this from the request your browser sends to load a page anyway: nothing is stored in or read from your browser for it, and no script runs.

For each page request, your IP address (shortened to its network part for IPv6) and your browser's user agent are turned into a hash using a key that exists only in our server's memory, is never written down and is replaced every day. Only that hash, the time and which part of the site the page belongs to (home page, dashboard or other pages) are kept, and only for five minutes. Neither the IP address nor the user agent is stored. The hash cannot be traced back to you, not even by us, and the same browser gets a different one the next day. What we see is a number, never an individual visit.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is knowing how busy the website is while we run it, for example to notice when a link has just been shared or a page is failing. We weighed this against your interests and reduced it accordingly: the data is hashed straight away, never leaves our own servers, is kept for five minutes and is used for a single total.

Kept

Five minutes after your last page request. The daily key is discarded at the end of each day.

Objecting

You can object at any time under Art. 21 GDPR by writing to us. Because nothing we keep can be linked to you, the practical effect is that the entry disappears on its own within five minutes.

Many accounts stop before their first bot is running, and we want to know at which step, so that we can make that step easier. For this our server notes, for your account, how far you got in onboarding and in adding a bot: when you finished onboarding, opened the screen for adding a bot and saved a plan for it, checked a token and whether it was accepted, when your bot was first in a server, when you reached the step about the two Discord switches and which of them was still off, whether adding the bot worked, whether you mailed yourself the setup link, and whether these requests came from a phone or a computer. Where something was refused, we keep our own short error code (for example “token invalid”).

All of it comes from the requests you make anyway to set up your bot. Nothing is stored in or read from your browser for it, no script sends anything, and no third party is involved. Whether a request came from a phone is worked out from the browser information it arrives with; that information itself is not stored. We never keep your token, the name or id of your server or bot, or Discord's messages. We look at the result only as totals across all new accounts, never per account.

On the first screen of adding a bot we also ask two optional questions, each answered with one tap from a fixed list: where you heard about us, and whether you already have a Discord server. If you answer, we keep the answer with the steps above, for the same purpose, for the same time, and only ever look at it as totals. If you skip them, nothing is stored.

We also read whether you have already checked a token for one other purpose: so that the setup reminder described under “Email we send you” does not go to you once you are past that step. This can only mean you get less email, never more.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is finding out where setting up a bot goes wrong, and where people hear about us, so that we can fix the one and do more of the other. We weighed this against your interests: only steps, our own codes and answers from a fixed list are kept, no content, nothing leaves our own systems, the figures are looked at only as totals, and everything is deleted after a short period.

Kept

90 days from your first recorded step, and never longer than your account exists. It is part of the data export you can request in your account settings.

Objecting

You can object at any time under Art. 21 GDPR by writing to us. We then delete what was recorded and record nothing more for your account.

Before you create your bot in Discord, you can plan it on our first screen: the name it should have, what it should do first (protection, a welcome message, leveling) and the text of the welcome message. We keep this plan with your account so that it is still there when you continue later or on another device, and so that we can switch on what you picked the moment your bot exists. If you have agreed to reminders, the setup reminder names the bot you planned.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. It is part of the service you are using: setting up the bot you asked for.

Kept

Until your bot is created, when the plan is applied and deleted, or until you skip or replace it. A plan nobody has changed for 30 days is deleted, and it never outlives your account. It is part of the data export you can request in your account settings.

We store information on your device in two cases. Where it is strictly necessary to provide the service you requested, no consent is needed (§ 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG). Everything else, which at present is only Google Analytics, is stored only after you have agreed in the cookie banner (§ 25(1) TDDDG). You can change your answer at any time under Cookie settings.

Strictly necessary, stored without asking:

Only with your consent:

When a bot operator switches on a feature, the bot may store data about the members of their server. We do this on the operator's instructions, as their processor. Depending on which features are enabled, that can include:

• Discord user IDs, usernames, display names and avatars of members who interact with a bot.
• Moderation records: bans, kicks, timeouts, warnings, the reason given and the moderator who acted.
• Levelling data: experience, level and when a member last wrote a message that counted for it.
• Invite tracking: which member joined through which invite, when they joined and left, and invite counters.
• Ticket, suggestion and giveaway participation: who took part and when, suggestion votes and giveaway winners, not what they wrote.
• Applications: who applied through which form and when, what was decided, by whom, and whether the applicant was told, not what they answered. For an application answered as an interview in a private channel, also which channel it is and which message answers which question, never what the messages say.
• Absences: who is away from when to when, who approved or denied it, and which role the bot gave for those days. Deleted as soon as the absence is over. A reason the member gives is not stored by us: it goes straight onto the card in the server's own channel.
• Events: who answered an event planned by the operator, and how (going, maybe, not going).
• Waiting room: who is waiting in a waiting-room voice channel right now, which one and since when. Deleted as soon as the wait ends (taken, left, or the feature switched off). Who took it is not stored by us: it is only in the message in the server's own channel.
• Anti-spam escalation counters, timed roles, ownership of temporary voice channels, and the last member to count in a counting channel.
• Text that moderators write through the bot: reasons for moderation actions, timed roles and channel locks, sticky messages, and giveaway prizes and descriptions.

We do not store the content of members' messages. Messages pass through the bot in memory so that the features an operator has enabled can act on them, and are then discarded. What a member writes into a suggestion, a ticket or an application stays in Discord, in the message or the channel they wrote it in. What we keep is the record that it happened, never the words. An application answered as an interview is read from the member's messages once, when they send it, and posted to the server's review channel like any other; the interview channel is deleted when the application is sent or cancelled, or after 60 minutes without activity. A team list works the same way: the bot reads which of the roles the operator chose a member holds (and, if the operator chooses to show names, the member's display name), keeps that in memory only, and shows it as a message in the channel the operator chose. We store only where that message is, nothing about who is on the list. Team management is the same again: when a team lead uses it, the bot changes the member's roles in Discord, with the reason in Discord's own audit log, and if the operator wants it posts an announcement in their channel. We store nothing about it.

Legal basis

For us: Art. 6(1)(b) and Art. 28 GDPR - processing on documented instructions. The bot operator is responsible for having their own legal basis.

Kept

Until the operator deletes it, deletes the bot, or the account is deleted, whichever comes first. Thirteen things expire on their own, without anyone asking: a giveaway is deleted 30 days after it ends, together with every entry and winner record it holds; a closed ticket's record is deleted 90 days after it closed, together with the list of who was added to it; a suggestion's record is deleted 90 days after it was posted, together with every vote on it; a moderation record is deleted 365 days after the action; the anti-spam escalation counters are deleted 180 days after they last changed; the record of which invite you joined through is deleted 90 days after you leave that server; your level and XP on a server are deleted after 180 days without activity; an application nobody decided expires after 30 days, and its record is deleted 90 days after the decision; the record of an application interview is deleted 24 hours after the interview ended, which it does at the latest after 60 minutes without activity; an event is deleted 30 days after it is over or was cancelled, together with every answer to it; an absence is deleted as soon as it is over (ended, withdrawn, denied or lapsed); a wait in a waiting room is deleted as soon as it ends, at the latest 24 hours after it began; and a counting channel forgets who counted last after 90 days without a count.

Levels

Worth stating on its own, because it is the one thing here that expires something you earned rather than a record that something happened. Your level and XP on a server are kept while you are active and deleted after 180 days without any: that means 180 days without a message that counted towards your level, and without the server's operator adjusting your XP by hand. Either one starts the clock again. Going quiet for a season does not cost you your level; going quiet for half a year does. One exception: XP an operator granted by hand to a member who has never sent a message that counted is not on this clock, and is kept until the operator removes it, deletes the bot, or the account is deleted.

Kept until deleted

Invite counts are the exception, and deliberately so: an invite count is a running total that changes only when somebody joins or leaves through that invite, so there is no activity of the inviter's to measure and no point at which they have done anything to lose it. Invite counts are kept until the operator removes them, deletes the bot, or the account is deleted. Any member can have theirs removed on request at any time, and the operator has a tool in the dashboard that does exactly that — which also applies to levels, ahead of the window above.

Every bot on our platform is set up for exactly one Discord server, and that is the only server it acts in or stores anything for. A bot can nevertheless end up in other servers, because adding it happens inside Discord rather than through us: anyone with the "Manage Server" permission in another server can add it, and a bot whose "Public Bot" setting is switched on in the Discord Developer Portal can be added by anyone.

While a bot sits in such a server, Discord sends it that server's live events over the gateway connection, in the same way it does for the server the bot manages. We cannot prevent Discord from sending them. What we can determine, and do, is what happens to them:

• Every incoming event is checked against the one server the bot is set up for, and anything from another server is discarded in memory the moment it arrives.
• No personal data from another server - no member, no message, no interaction, no record of any kind - is written to our database, our logs, our analytics or our backups.
• The bot does not respond to commands, buttons or any other interaction in such a server, and no feature you have configured applies there.

There is one exception, and it holds no personal data: we store the total number of servers each bot is in. We need that number to show bot operators whether their bot is somewhere they did not intend, which is what the setting below is for. It is a count and nothing else - not the names of those servers, not their IDs, and nothing about anybody in them.

Apart from that count, data from a server a bot does not manage is received and immediately dropped. It is never stored, never used and never passed on. We consider even this unavoidable moment of processing more than we want, which is why bot operators can instruct us to have the bot leave such servers automatically - see the Terms of Service. For bots added after that setting was introduced it is switched on by default.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest, and that of the affected servers, is limited to discarding the data: receiving it is a technical consequence of Discord's gateway that we cannot switch off separately, and the processing goes no further than rejecting it.

Kept

Not at all. The data exists only in memory for the moment it takes to identify which server it came from, and is never written to any storage.

Service email. Messages about your account and your bots - an outage, a security event, a change to these terms - are sent on the basis of Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR because they are part of the service. They cannot be switched off entirely while you hold an account, though you control which operational alerts you receive.

Product and promotional email. News about new features, tips and reminders about your bots and your account, offers and surveys are sent only if you have actively switched them on. One such reminder goes, once, to an account that finished signing up an hour ago and has neither added a bot nor checked a token; it names the bot you planned, if you planned one. Another goes, once per account, when a bot you added has not run for three days because no plan or free trial is on it; it names the bot and states the trial's terms. The legal basis is your consent under Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and § 7(2) no. 2 UWG. Nothing is pre-ticked and nothing is sent by default.

You can withdraw that consent at any time with no reason and no disadvantage, either by switching the relevant option off in your account settings or by using the unsubscribe link in any such email. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before it.

Unsubscribing from any email. Every email we send has an unsubscribe option your mail program can show. It switches off what that email was about: bot alerts, the weekly recap, moderator invitations or a kind of promotional email. An email about your account or a purchase, which we have to send, keeps coming; using the option there switches off our promotional email instead. If you unsubscribe through our email provider Brevo rather than through us, Brevo tells us. We then switch off the same in your account and remove the block Brevo set, so that the emails we owe you, such as order confirmations, still reach you. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR where this carries out a withdrawal of consent or an objection (Art. 7(3) and Art. 21(3) GDPR), and Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR otherwise.

Moderator invitations. If someone who runs a bot here invites you to help manage it, we send you one email so you can accept or decline. It is the only message we send that another user causes, so it is deliberately narrow: it is sent to the address already on your account and never to one somebody typed in, it contains no text written by the person inviting you, and it grants nothing - no access exists unless you accept. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our and the inviting operator's legitimate interest in letting people share the administration of a bot without handing over the account. How much of it you can receive is capped and the caps are enforced, not aspirational: one bot may email you at most three times in a week however its operator goes about it - reminders, a withdrawn invitation and a fresh one all count the same - and across every operator on the platform you will not receive more than five invitation emails in a day. Withdrawing an invitation does not give anyone a new allowance to spend on you.

What we store

Who was invited, who invited them, which permissions were offered, when it was sent, and whether it was accepted, declined, withdrawn or left to expire. Separately, a minimal record of each invitation email sent - who it went to, who caused it, which bot, and when - which is what the caps above are counted from. Never your email address: the inviting operator picks you by Discord username and is never shown an address.

Kept

An invitation that has been answered, withdrawn or has expired is deleted 90 days later. An invitation still waiting for you is kept until you answer it or it runs out. The record of sent emails is deleted after 30 days, and is erased immediately if you delete your account.

The setup link. If you ask for it on the screen where you add a bot, we send you one email with the link to that screen, so you can carry on at a computer. It is sent only when you press the button, at most once a day, and only to the address on your account, never to one somebody typed in. It contains the link and how to use it, nothing else. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR: you asked for it while using the service.

The record of what we sent. For every email we send you we keep a short record: what kind of email it was, which bot it was about, when it was sent, and the message id our email provider gave it. Never the text of the email. We use it so that the same email is never sent twice and so that the limits on how much we send you can be enforced, and to be able to show what we sent if that is ever questioned. Behind an alert about a bot outage there is also a record of the incident itself, which is how we send one alert per outage rather than one per check.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR for sending service email and avoiding duplicates, and for product and promotional email your consent under Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR; Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR for keeping the record as evidence. Our legitimate interest is being able to answer whether, and when, an email was sent. We weighed this against your interests and reduced it accordingly: no content and no address is kept, and the record expires on its own.

Kept

The record of sent emails is deleted after 365 days, and immediately if you delete your account. An outage record is deleted 90 days after the outage ended; one that is still open is kept until it ends.

Our email provider, Brevo, processes your address and the message content on our behalf under a data processing agreement; see who else sees your data.

Brevo adds a small invisible image to every email it delivers for us and records when it is loaded, and for links in an email whether they were followed. When your email program loads that image, Brevo receives the time, your IP address and the kind of program you use. This is a setting of the provider that cannot be switched off in our account. We do not use these figures to build a profile of you or for advertising, and we do not look them up for individual people. Many email programs load such images through a proxy or not at all (Apple Mail's Mail Privacy Protection, for example), and if yours does not load images automatically, nothing is recorded. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; our legitimate interest is noticing when our email is not being delivered.

From the dashboard you can report a bug or suggest a feature. We store what you send so that we can read it, work on it and show you its status in your own list. Nobody but you and our staff can see it.

What we store

Your account, whether it is a bug or a suggestion, the severity you chose, the title and text you wrote, the bot it concerns if you picked one, the language of the dashboard, a shortened version of your browser user agent so that we can reproduce the bug, and its status. No IP address.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: our legitimate interest in improving the service and in answering what you sent. Sending it is voluntary.

Recipients

Supabase, which stores it; see who else sees your data.

Retention

You can delete an entry yourself while it is still open. Otherwise a closed entry (shipped, declined or a duplicate) is deleted 365 days after it was closed, and every entry at the latest 730 days after you sent it. Deleting your account deletes all of them at once.

The front page has a form that takes an email address so we can tell you, once, when the service opens. That announcement is the only message we send unless you separately ask for more.

A second box, and it is optional. Under the first one there is a second, unticked box asking whether you also want occasional emails about the product after launch. It is a separate decision and it is never a condition: the announcement is sent either way, and leaving it empty changes nothing else. Ticking it changes exactly one thing about what we store, which is that your address is kept until you withdraw instead of being deleted a week after the announcement.

Confirmation first. Anyone can type anyone's address into a public form, so entering one does not put it on the list. We send a single, deliberately plain email asking whether the request was yours, and nothing is recorded as a subscription unless you click the link in it. If it was not you, ignoring that email ends the matter and you will not hear from us again. The link stops working after 72 hours.

What we collect

Your email address, your language, the times the request and the confirmation arrived, salted one-way hashes of your address and of the two IP addresses they came from, the exact wording you agreed to, and which of the two boxes you ticked. Not your name, and not your browser user agent.

Why

To send you one email announcing that the service is open, and to be able to show that you asked for it. If you ticked the second box, also to send you occasional emails about the product: a handful a year, never anybody else’s advertising.

Legal basis

Your consent, under Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and § 7(2) no. 2 UWG, for the emails themselves. For keeping the consent record afterwards, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: our legitimate interest is being able to demonstrate consent as Art. 7(1) GDPR requires, and to defend a claim that we mailed somebody who had not asked. That is also what fixes its length, at §§ 195 and 199(1) BGB.

Kept

A request nobody confirms is deleted after 7 days. A confirmed address is deleted within 7 days of the announcement going out, and immediately if you withdraw before then. If you ticked the optional second box, your address is instead kept until you withdraw, which every email we send links to in one click. What outlives all of those is the record described above with the address removed from it, until the end of the third calendar year after the request (§§ 195, 199(1) BGB).

Recipients

Our email provider, database provider (where the list is stored) and application host, each as a processor under Art. 28 GDPR, and our network provider, which sees the request in transit. All are listed under who else sees your data. Nobody else, and nothing is passed to anyone for their own advertising.

Withdrawal

At any time, under Art. 7(3) GDPR, from the link in either email or by writing to privacy@ruination-bots.com. It takes effect immediately and deletes the address. The link in the confirmation email works before you confirm as well as after, so if that email was not something you asked for you can have the address deleted straight away rather than waiting for the request to expire. Withdrawing does not affect the lawfulness of anything sent before it.

Spam protection. The form is defended the same way the contact form is, and for a sharper reason: a signup form sends mail to an address the person filling it in chose, so an unprotected one is a way to have our domain deliver unwanted mail to a stranger. There is a hidden field only an automated sender would fill in, a proof-of-work the browser has to compute, a limit on how many messages one connection may cause, and a separate limit on how often any one address can be sent a confirmation however many connections are used. The connection limits work from the same keyed, one-way hash of your network address as the contact form's, stored in our database and deleted automatically after at most 24 hours (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). As with the contact form, we deliberately use no captcha service.

The form answers the same way whatever the outcome. If an address is already on the list, the page says exactly what it says for a new one. That is deliberate: anybody can type your address into it, and an answer that varied would tell them whether you had signed up.

Our contact page lets you reach us without an account. Whatever you type there goes to our mailbox and nowhere else - it is not written to our database, so there is no second copy of your enquiry sitting in a system you would have to ask us to search.

What we collect

The category you pick, your email address, a subject, your message, and your name if you choose to give one. The name is optional and nothing depends on it. A notice of illegal content additionally asks for where the content is and for a good-faith statement, and there the name is required, because Art. 16(2) of the Digital Services Act lists it as part of a notice; only a notice about child sexual abuse material may be sent without name and email address. A notice will usually also contain information about the person whose content you report.

Why

To read your enquiry, answer it, and keep track of it if it takes more than one exchange.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR where your message concerns a contract with us or steps taken before entering one; Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR otherwise, our legitimate interest being the ability to respond to people who contact us. Where a message asks us to do something the law obliges us to do - a data subject request, a takedown - Art. 6(1)(c) applies as well. For a notice of illegal content that is the basis: Art. 16 of the Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) obliges us to receive and process notices, to confirm receipt and to tell the notifier our decision.

Kept

Your message is until your enquiry is fully dealt with, then deleted - unless the exchange counts as a business letter or an accounting voucher, in which case § 147 AO requires it to be kept for 6 or 8 years respectively.

Recipients

Our email providers, each as a processor under Art. 28 GDPR: Brevo delivers the message and Zoho Mail holds the mailbox it lands in, both listed under who else sees your data. Nobody else.

Spam protection. The form is protected by a hidden field that only an automated sender would fill in, a check that the form was on screen for at least a few seconds, and a limit on how many messages one connection may send. That limit works from a keyed, one-way hash of your network address (your IPv4 address, or the /64 block an IPv6 address belongs to), never the address itself. The hash is stored in our database at Supabase, listed under who else sees your data, and deleted automatically after at most 24 hours. It is not linked to your message, your email address or an account. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR and our interest in a contact route that still works when somebody points a script at it. We deliberately do not use a captcha service, because the usual ones would load third-party code into the page and send your IP address to their operator.

For every category except a notice of illegal content, this form sends no automatic acknowledgement; the confirmation shown on screen after sending, including its reference number, is your record that the message went out. A notice of illegal content that includes an email address gets a confirmation of receipt by email, because Art. 16(5) of the Digital Services Act requires one. So that nobody can use this to have mail sent to an address that is not theirs, that email contains nothing you typed - only our reference number, the time and fixed text - no address receives more than two of them in 24 hours, and only a small number are sent in total; beyond that we confirm receipt by hand. To count that, we store a keyed, one-way hash of the address, never the address itself, in the same table and for the same at most 24 hours as the network hash above (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We do not pass your name or email address to the person whose content you reported unless the law requires us to. The launch notification list also sends a confirmation email, and the section on it describes what stops that being abused.

We run a channel on YouTube, a profile on X and a community server on Discord, to show what the product does and to answer questions. Opening a link to them from this website sends nothing to those platforms before you click it. Once you are there, the platform processes your data as a controller in its own right and under its own privacy policy; we have no influence on what it collects or how it uses it, and it may process data outside the EU.

What we process

What you address to us there or post in our spaces, together with the account name and profile picture the platform shows with it: comments on our videos, replies, mentions and direct messages on X, and messages in our Discord server. The platforms also show us statistics about our audience, such as views, impressions and member counts. These are aggregated; we cannot tell from them who an individual visitor is.

Why

To inform about the service, answer questions and give support, and to moderate our own spaces, including removing content that breaks the rules of the platform or of our server.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: our legitimate interest in public communication and in answering people where they choose to reach us. Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR where your message concerns a contract with us or steps before entering one.

Kept

What you post stays on the platform, for as long as the platform keeps it. You can delete your own posts there yourself, and we remove a post in our spaces when you ask us to. If a request moves to email, what is said under when you write to us applies.

The platforms

YouTube: Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland (privacy policy). X: X Internet Unlimited Company, One Cumberland Place, Fenian Street, Dublin 2, D02 AX07, Ireland (privacy policy). Discord: Discord Netherlands B.V., Schiphol Boulevard 195, 1118 BG Schiphol, Netherlands (privacy policy).

You can assert your rights against us for what we do ourselves. For everything the platform holds, such as your account, your usage data and the data behind its statistics, only the platform has access, so a request is answered fastest when you send it there directly. If you send it to us, we pass it on to the platform.

Please do not send us passwords, bot tokens or other confidential details over these channels. Use the contact page instead.

Our cancellation page lets you cancel a paid plan without logging in, as § 312k of the German Civil Code (BGB) requires.

What we collect

Whether the cancellation is ordinary or extraordinary and, for an extraordinary one, the reason you give; your name; your email address; which contract you are cancelling and, if you give them, an order number or bot name; the date you want the contract to end; the language of the page; and the time your cancellation arrived. We look up whether an account uses that email address and, if so, note which one.

Why

To confirm your cancellation by email straight away, to carry it out, and to be able to show later what you declared and when.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR in conjunction with § 312k BGB, which obliges us to receive the cancellation and confirm it immediately with its content, the time it arrived and when the contract ends; Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR for ending the contract. Keeping the record afterwards rests on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in being able to prove when and what was cancelled if a charge or a refund is disputed.

Kept

Until the end of the third calendar year after the cancellation arrived (the regular limitation period, §§ 195 and 199 BGB), then deleted automatically. Deleting your account does not delete it sooner (Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR). The copy in our mailbox is kept for the same period.

Recipients

Supabase stores the record; Brevo sends the confirmation to you and a copy to our mailbox at Zoho Mail; Polar, as the seller of the plan, is told to end the subscription or refund what is owed. All are listed under who else sees your data.

The page is protected against automated misuse the same way as the contact form: a hidden field, a short computation your browser does in the background, and limits per network, counted with a keyed one-way hash of your network address that is deleted after at most 24 hours. Because the confirmation goes to the address typed in, we also count confirmations per address with a keyed one-way hash of it, deleted after at most 24 hours, and send no address more than three a day; beyond that we confirm by hand (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The page shows the same answer whether or not an account uses the address, so nobody can use it to find out who is a customer.

Our withdrawal page lets you withdraw from a purchase within the withdrawal period without logging in, as § 356a BGB requires.

What we collect

Your name; your email address; which purchase you are withdrawing from and, if you give them, an order number or bot name; the language of the page; and the time your withdrawal arrived. We look up whether an account uses that email address and, if so, note which one, and read that account's purchases and payments to work out whether the withdrawal period is still running and what is to be refunded.

Why

To confirm your withdrawal by email straight away, to end the contract and refund you, and to be able to show later what you declared and when.

Legal basis

Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR in conjunction with § 356a BGB, which obliges us to provide the withdrawal function and confirm a withdrawal without undue delay with its content and the date and time it arrived, and with § 357 BGB, which obliges us to refund you within 14 days; Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR for unwinding the contract. Keeping the record afterwards rests on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in being able to prove when and what was withdrawn if a refund is disputed.

Kept

Until the end of the third calendar year after the withdrawal arrived (the regular limitation period, §§ 195 and 199 BGB), then deleted automatically. Deleting your account does not delete it sooner (Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR). The copy in our mailbox is kept for the same period.

Recipients

Supabase stores the record; Brevo sends the confirmation to you and a copy to our mailbox at Zoho Mail; Polar, as the seller of the plan, makes the refund and ends the subscription. All are listed under who else sees your data.

The page is protected against automated misuse exactly like the cancellation page, with the same hashed, short-lived counters and the same limit of three confirmations per address a day, and it too shows the same answer whether or not an account uses the address.

Paid plans are sold by our payment provider Polar as merchant of record (see who else sees your data). You enter your payment details on Polar's checkout, not on ours. We never receive or store your card or other payment details.

When a payment, renewal, cancellation or refund happens, Polar notifies us. From that notification we keep: Polar's customer, order and subscription identifiers, the invoice number, the plan and billing period, the amounts (including tax and Polar's fee), the currency, the date, and the email address the invoice was sent to. The notification itself also contains your billing country. We keep the complete notification as evidence of what Polar told us, in case a payment did not activate, renew or end your plan as it should have (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR - our legitimate interest in resolving and defending such disputes), and delete it 90 days after we have processed it. Deleting your account does not shorten this period (Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR). A notification we could not process is kept until the problem is resolved and then for the same 90 days.

We use this data to activate, renew and end your plan (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and to keep the accounting records the law requires of us (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR in conjunction with § 147 of the German Fiscal Code). Those records are kept for eight years from the end of the calendar year in which they were made, are used for nothing else, and are not deleted when you delete your account (Art. 17(3)(b) GDPR).

If you cancel a half-yearly or yearly plan after its first term, it ends one month after your cancellation and we refund what you paid for the time after that. To carry this out we note your account, the subscription, the plan, the paid period, when you cancelled, the end date and the amounts (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). The note is deleted with your account, and in any case one year after the plan ended.

Before you continue to the checkout, you ask us to start your plan straight away, before the withdrawal period ends. We record that you did, for which plan, in which wording and language, and when, because the law makes it our burden to prove it if you withdraw and we deduct the time already provided (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR in conjunction with § 357a(2) BGB). After every new purchase we email you an order confirmation with the contract details, the withdrawal instructions and our Terms, as § 312f BGB requires, and note the order, the amounts, the address it went to and when it was sent (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR). A request that leads to no purchase is deleted after seven days; everything else is kept until the end of the third calendar year after the purchase (§§ 195 and 199 BGB) as proof if a refund or the withdrawal period is disputed (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), and is not deleted sooner when you delete your account (Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR). To build the confirmation, our server reads the Terms and the withdrawal instructions from this website; no personal data is involved in that.

If a renewal payment fails, we email you when it happens, a week before Polar's last attempt, and if your plan ends because of it. To send these we note your account, the subscription, the plan and the dates (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). The note is deleted with your account, and in any case one year after the payment was made or the plan ended.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. Data is disclosed only to the providers we need in order to run the service, each bound by a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR and permitted to act only on our instructions:

In addition, and only if you have agreed in the cookie banner: Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, for Google Analytics. What it receives, and how to take your consent back, is set out under analytics and tracking.

The current list is maintained at Sub-processors.

The following services are not processors: they decide for themselves how they handle data and act as independent controllers. Your relationship with them is governed by their own privacy policies.

We may also disclose data where we are legally obliged to, for example to law enforcement on a valid order, or where necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims (Art. 6(1)(c) and (f) GDPR).

Some of the providers above are established in the United States or operate infrastructure there. Where personal data leaves the EU or EEA, the transfer is covered by one of the safeguards in Chapter V GDPR - as a rule the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses under Art. 46(2)(c), supplemented by technical measures such as encryption in transit and at rest, and where applicable the adequacy decision for the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework under Art. 45.

For Google Analytics, which is used only with your consent: Google Ireland Limited may transfer data to Google LLC in the United States. Google LLC states that it is certified under the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework, so the transfer rests on the European Commission's adequacy decision under Art. 45 GDPR, and Google's data processing terms provide for the Standard Contractual Clauses should that decision cease to apply. The adequacy decision is being challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union (C-703/25 P). We follow that case and will change or stop this processing if its basis falls away.

You can request a copy of the safeguards in place at privacy@ruination-bots.com. We would also point out honestly that United States authorities may have access rights that have no equivalent under EU law, and that enforceable data subject rights against such access may be limited.

You have the following rights in respect of your personal data:

• Access (Art. 15 GDPR) - confirmation of whether we process your data, a copy of it, and the details of that processing.
• Rectification (Art. 16 GDPR) - correction of inaccurate data and completion of incomplete data.
• Erasure (Art. 17 GDPR) - deletion where one of the listed grounds applies. You can also delete your entire account yourself, at any time, from your account settings.
• Restriction (Art. 18 GDPR) - of processing in the cases set out there.
• Data portability (Art. 20 GDPR) - the data you provided, in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
• Objection (Art. 21 GDPR) - to processing based on legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your particular situation. Where data is processed for direct marketing you may object at any time, without giving reasons, and we will stop.
• Withdrawal of consent (Art. 7(3) GDPR) - at any time, with effect for the future.
• Complaint (Art. 77 GDPR) - to a supervisory authority, in particular in the member state of your residence, place of work or the alleged infringement.

To exercise any of these, write to privacy@ruination-bots.com. We answer within one month and will tell you if we need longer, as Art. 12(3) GDPR permits in complex cases. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

For access and portability, write to the address above from the email address on your account, or use the privacy panel in your account settings, which links to it. We answer with a single JSON file containing the personal data this account holds - your profile, the bots you own and their configuration, the bots shared with you, your own activity, your feedback, your bots’ statistics and uptime history, your plans and billing history including the payment provider’s own records of you, the record of which versions of our Terms you accepted, and the log of the alert and notification emails we have sent you - within the one month set out above and free of charge. It carries the same explanation of purposes, recipients and retention that this page does, so the file still makes sense to whoever opens it a year from now. It never contains your bot tokens, and it never contains the personal data of the members of your Discord server, which is yours to process as the controller of that server rather than ours to hand out.

Before we hand over a copy we check that the request comes from the holder of the account, and we never send the file as an unprotected email attachment. The file we build for you is deleted 7 days after it is built, whether or not you downloaded it.

The free trial is offered once per account and once per Discord server. To be able to tell whether it has already been used, we keep one small record of every trial we grant.

That record does not contain your Discord username, your email address or the name of your server. It contains three one way cryptographic values computed from them, using a secret key that is held by our servers and is never stored in the database alongside them. The record can answer exactly one question, and only when someone supplies those details to ask it with: has this person already had a trial? It cannot be used to contact you, to build a profile, to group you with anyone else, or to show you a different price. We do not record your IP address or anything about your device for this purpose.

This record is kept when you delete your account. We are telling you this plainly because it is the one thing about it you would not expect. If it were erased along with everything else, deleting your account would itself be the way to get a second free trial, and a trial that can be taken repeatedly is not one we could offer at all.

We keep it for 12 months from the day the trial was granted, after which it is deleted automatically and you become eligible again. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in preventing repeated use of an offer made once per customer, under Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. Because that is a balancing test rather than a legal obligation, it depends on the record staying as limited as it is described above and on the deletion actually happening.

If you move your trial to a bot on a different Discord server, we add one further record of the same kind for that server, so that the trial still counts once per server. It contains the same three kinds of value and nothing else, is kept for 12 months from the day of the move, and everything said here about the first record applies to it as well.

You can still ask us what we hold. We can answer, because at that point we have your details and can recompute the values, so a copy of your data includes the date any trial was granted and the date the record expires. You can also object to it under Article 21 GDPR, and we will weigh it rather than refuse on principle. See your rights.

Deleting your account from the settings page shuts down every bot you own, deletes those bots together with their configuration and stored tokens, removes you as a moderator from anyone else's bots, deletes your profile and avatar files, deletes any data export you had built but not yet downloaded, and erases your account row. It happens immediately, with backups overwritten within 30 days and cannot be undone.

If you have an active paid plan, deleting your account cancels it at the same time, so that closing your account also stops the billing. We keep a record that we cancelled it - which subscription and plan, and when - because it is the proof that the charging was stopped, should a charge after that ever be disputed. It holds no name, email address or payment details. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in being able to defend against such a claim, and it is kept until the end of the third calendar year after the cancellation was confirmed, the period in which such a claim can be brought (§§ 195, 199 BGB; Art. 17(3)(e) GDPR).

Five exceptions, all narrow. Data that we are legally required to keep - the accounting records described under payments and billing records, kept for eight years under § 147 AO - is kept and processed for that purpose only. The record that we cancelled your plan, described just above, is kept for the period given there. Data your bots stored on behalf of servers you do not own remains with the bot that owns it, because it was never yours to delete. The record of which version of our Terms you accepted is kept for the period given under account, sign-in and profile. And the record that you have already used your free trial is kept, for the reason and for the period set out under the record that you have used your free trial.

Our payment provider holds its own copy of your billing details, as the seller of record and as its own controller rather than on our instructions. When you delete your account we ask it to anonymise the customer record it keeps for us, once any subscription has been cancelled. It keeps the orders and invoices it is itself required to keep, and decides that under its own obligations, not ours. To exercise your rights against it, contact the provider named in the recipients section above.

Providing your data is neither required by law nor by contract, but the data described under account, sign-in and profile and under bots and their configuration is necessary to create an account and to run a bot. Without it we cannot provide the service. There is no obligation to give consent to product email, and refusing has no consequence for your use of the service.

We do not use automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you, within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR. Automated technical measures such as rate limiting and abuse detection may temporarily restrict access to the API; these are protective measures, they are reviewable by a human on request, and they do not evaluate personal aspects.

We apply technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk under Art. 32 GDPR, in particular:

• TLS encryption for all traffic between your browser, our API and our providers.
• Bot tokens encrypted at rest with a separate key, never returned to the browser, never written to logs.
• Row-level security in the database, so an account can only read its own rows even if application code is at fault.
• Least-privilege access: administrative database credentials exist only on the server side and are never exposed to the client.
• Request bodies excluded from all application logging, because they can carry credentials.
• Automatic expiry of audit data and hashing of IP addresses rather than storing them.

No system is perfectly secure. If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the competent supervisory authority within 72 hours under Art. 33 GDPR and inform you directly where Art. 34 requires it.

Where we rely on your consent, the GDPR sets the age for valid consent to information society services at 16, which German law has not lowered (Art. 8(1) GDPR).

That covers three things: Google Analytics, which you accept or reject in the cookie banner, the launch notification list, and product and promotional email. Using the service itself requires a Discord account, and Discord's own terms set a minimum age for that. Everything else we do rests on the performance of the contract rather than on consent.

If you believe somebody under 16 has given us consent without that authorisation, contact us at privacy@ruination-bots.com and we will delete the record and stop anything it would have caused to be sent.

We update this policy when the service changes or the law does. The date at the top always shows the current version. Where a change materially affects how we process your data we will tell you by email or in the dashboard before it takes effect, and where a change requires your consent we will ask for it rather than assume it.