Your Data & Privacy Controls
Downloading your data is self-serve and instant. Erasing it is not: you request it, and a person reviews the request before it runs — the reason why is set out below. Server owners ask for their server's erasure the same way. The full legal detail is in the Privacy Policy; this page is the practical version.
Download your data
- Sign in and open your Account page.
- Go to What we hold about you, which lists every record we have of you and where it is held.
- Click Download my data.
You get a JSON file containing everything Vortigern holds about you, across every server it shares with you — log entries, faction roster rows, applications, posts, punishments and access overrides. If we hold nothing for you, the file's store list is simply empty.
Request erasure of your data
- Same panel: pick the reason you are asking, explain it in at least 30 characters, tick each confirmation and type your Discord username.
- The request is filed as a case on our support desk. We open a private channel for it in our support server, with you (if you are in the server, or as soon as you join) and our support staff, so you can talk it through.
- Staff decide on the website, not in the channel. On approval the erasure runs in full, the discussion channel is deleted with it, and you are told what was removed and what — if anything — was kept.
Erasure is reviewed rather than instant for one reason: run on a button click, it doubled as a way out of a punishment. Records about you include disciplinary ones, so anyone carrying a live infraction could clear it themselves, in two clicks, with nobody told. Review closes that without making you wait on anything else — we act within 30 days, and normally within a few days.
| Data | What happens |
|---|---|
| Your logged messages and join/leave entries | Deleted |
| Your faction applications and their answers | Deleted |
| Your posts and announcements | Deleted |
| Your roster entries | Deleted |
| Your shift records | Deleted |
| Your elevated-access overrides | Deleted |
| Your appeal and support cases | Deleted |
| Audit entries for settings you changed | Kept, with your identity replaced by [erased] |
| Punishments you issued or received | Kept, with identities replaced by [erased] |
| An active infraction or refused appeal against you | Deleted, but a minimal note is kept — what it was, which server, when — so erasure cannot clear a live punishment |
Why some records are anonymised rather than deleted. If erasure deleted moderation and audit records outright, anyone could wipe the record of their own actions against other people by pressing one button. So those entries survive with every identifier stripped: the server keeps an accurate history, and it can no longer be tied to you. Everything that exists only to describe you is deleted outright.
Erasure covers what Vortigern stores. It cannot remove your messages from Discord itself, anything a server's staff copied elsewhere, or screenshots. For Discord's own copy of your data, use Discord's privacy settings.
For server owners
Under Settings → Data & Privacy you control what your server collects:
- Store message content — off by default. When off, no message text is ever written to disk for your server. Turning it off later stops new collection but does not remove what is already stored — request erasure for that.
- Export Server Data — a JSON file of everything held for your server.
- Request Erasure — asks us to remove all of it: logs, audit trail, factions, rosters, applications, settings and uploaded images. Owner-only, needs a reason, the confirmations and the server's name typed out, and is talked through in a private channel in our support server before staff decide on the website. Irreversible once approved.
If you enable message content logging, tell your members. Depending on where they live, logging their messages without notice may breach privacy law, and that obligation is yours as the server operator. Announcing it in your rules channel is usually enough.
Removing the bot erases your server's data automatically. You do not need to erase first — kicking Vortigern deletes everything held for that server as the removal is processed.
What is never collected
- Your email address, real name, phone number or payment details.
- Your direct messages — the bot ignores DMs entirely.
- Message content in any server that has not switched it on.
- Third-party analytics, telemetry, advertising or tracking data. There are no third-party scripts on the dashboard, and nothing follows you across the web. The one exception is first-party and aggregate: each server keeps a daily count of joins, leaves and messages, plus how many distinct people posted, to draw its own Analytics page. Those rows hold no message text and no usernames — you appear in them only as a one-way code that cannot be read back into your ID, and that code is dropped after 100 days, leaving nothing but a number.
Your IP address is used briefly in memory to rate-limit requests and is never written to a file or log. Your Discord login session, including the access token, is stored server-side for at most 12 hours and is destroyed when you log out.
Still need help?
If a control does not work for you, or you want data removed that the tools above do not cover, ask in the support server. Requests are answered within 30 days at the outside, usually much sooner.