Privacy

Without an account, nothing you do on DaoSearch is tied to you. There's no advertising. The only measurement is Cloudflare's page-view count, which uses no cookies and doesn't identify anyone.

If you sign in, we keep your email address, the sign-ins you connect, and what you save. Your shelf is private. Nobody else can see it, and we don't sell or share any of it.

Your account also gets a public username and picture. They show on your profile page and next to any report you send us, and that's the only place anything about your account is public.

You can sign in with Google or Discord. We ask them for your account ID, your email address, and whether they have verified that address. We don't ask for your name, your picture, your contacts or anything else.

They give us a temporary access key to read those details. We use it once and throw it away, so we never hold it and can't act on your Google or Discord account.

We only treat a Google sign-in and a Discord sign-in as the same person when both of them have verified the same email address. If either hasn't, they stay separate accounts. That rule is what stops someone who puts your address on a new account from getting into yours.

Your email address and whether it was verified. The sign-ins connected to your account. When you created it and when you last signed in. The novels you save with the shelf you put each one on, the booklists you follow, and your named saved searches.

Your username, the usernames you had before it, and your profile picture. The reports you send us, with our replies, and your notifications. Each of these has its own section below.

We also keep a record for each browser you're signed in on, so we can recognise it. That record holds a scrambled form of your session key, never the key itself. It's deleted after 30 days without a visit, or as soon as you sign out.

If you create an API key, we keep a scrambled form of it (never the key itself), its first few characters so you can tell which key it is, when you created it, and the day it was last used. Today's request and unit counts against its limits are kept only until the day resets. Regenerating or revoking the key stops the old one at once.

Every account gets a made-up username when it's created, something like AzureCrane4821, drawn from a list of words. It never comes from Google, Discord or your email address. You can change it on your account page: the first change is free, and after that you can change it once every 7 days.

Your profile is at daosearch.io/u/ followed by your username, and anyone can open it. It shows your username, your picture, the month you joined, and the reports of yours that led to a fix, with what each one was about. It never shows your email, your sign-ins, your shelf, the exact day you joined, reports that are still open or that we didn't act on, or anything you wrote in a report. We ask search engines not to index profiles.

When you change your username we keep a record of the old one with your account. For 30 days the old name stays reserved for you, so nobody else can take it and pass as you, and links to your old profile forward to the new one. After 30 days anyone can claim it. The record of your past names stays with your account until the account is deleted.

Your picture starts out as a generated avatar, drawn by DiceBear from a random code that says nothing about you. Our server fetches it and stores it, so your browser never talks to DiceBear, even while you shuffle through new ones on your account page.

You can upload your own picture instead: a JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP of up to 512 KB. It's public, like your username, so pick something you're happy for anyone to see. Before we store it we crop it to a square, shrink it to 256 by 256 pixels and save it as a fresh JPEG. That strips out everything hidden in the original file, including camera details and GPS location.

Pictures are stored on Cloudflare R2 and served from bucket.daosearch.io. When you change yours, the old file is deleted within a day, which gives pages that are already open time to catch up.

When you report a problem with a book or a booklist, we store the report with your account: what it's about, the reason you picked, and any note you add.

We also post it in the #reports channel of our Discord server, with your username, a link to your profile, and how many of your earlier reports were approved or not. Every member of the server can read that channel. Your email address and your sign-ins are never posted, but your note is, so please leave personal details out of it.

A moderator reviews the report there. When they decide, their reply comes to you as a notification on the site, and your Reports page keeps the whole history with every reply. We keep reports and replies so we can see what was fixed and why.

Notifications only live on the site. We don't send email or push notifications. You'll get one when a moderator answers a report, when we change something on your account (for example, if we reset a username or picture that broke our rules), for the daily digest, and for the odd piece of site news.

The digest is at most one note a day about the books on your Planned and Reading shelves that got new chapters, finished, climbed a ranking or left their source. To spot those changes we keep a small record per book of what we last saw, such as its chapter count, status and best ranking.

You can turn the digest off in Notification settings by switching off Library updates, and site news can be switched off in the same place. Report replies and account notices can't be turned off, because they answer something you did or tell you about something we did to your account.

We delete read notifications after 180 days and unread ones after 365 days.

If you never sign in, DaoSearch sets no cookies at all. Your theme, the ranking view you last looked at, and how you like booklists sorted are kept in your browser's local storage. They never leave your device.

Signing in uses three cookies, all of them ours and none of them for tracking. ds_session keeps you signed in, and scripts on the page can't read it. ds_auth only says that someone is signed in on this browser, so the page knows to show your account menu. It holds nothing about you. Both last 30 days from your last visit and are removed when you sign out.

While a sign-in is in progress, a third cookie, __Host-ds_oauth_google or __Host-ds_oauth_discord, holds a one-time check for up to 5 minutes. It's deleted the moment you come back from Google or Discord.

While you're signed in, your browser's local storage also keeps the first letter of your username, the address of your picture and your unread count, so the header can draw them straight away on the next page. They're cleared once the site sees you've signed out.

The same thing every web server sees: the page you asked for, your IP address, and your browser's user agent. We use it to serve the page and keep the site up, and we don't build profiles from it.

We also record how long pages take to render, so we can find the slow ones. Those timings are grouped by page, like “the browse page took 40ms”, and never by visitor. Sign-in pages are recorded without the one-time codes Google and Discord send back.

Cloudflare sits in front of the site to deliver it quickly and absorb abuse, so requests pass through their network under their own privacy policy. Their Web Analytics counts page views and load times for us. It sets no cookies, keeps no profile of a visitor, and we see totals only.

You can download your saved books, followed booklists and saved searches as JSON from your Account page. The download includes your shelf statuses, source links and saved search filters. Your reports and notifications are on their own pages whenever you're signed in.

Email us and we'll send you a copy of everything we hold about you, including your past usernames and your reports. Write from the address on your account, so we can tell the request is yours.

Email us the same way to have your account deleted. That removes your email address, your connected sign-ins, your sessions, your API key, everything you saved, your username and its history, your profile pictures and your notifications. Your reports stay, so the fixes they led to still make sense, but they're no longer linked to you. The copies already posted in our Discord keep the username you had then; say so in your email and we'll delete those too. Once it's done we can't undo it.

Deleting your DaoSearch account doesn't touch your Google or Discord account. You can also remove DaoSearch's access from their own settings at any time.

DaoSearch shows reader comments from the source platforms, and deliberately does not store who wrote them. Usernames and avatars are discarded on the way in. Each commenter becomes a stable pseudonym like Reader-4f21c8, so a conversation still reads as a conversation, and we keep no way to reverse it.

Your DaoSearch account is a separate thing. Nothing from it is ever shown next to a comment. Your username and picture appear only on your own profile and in our Discord's reports channel, and no username can start with Reader, so a DaoSearch reader is never mistaken for one of those pseudonyms.

Book covers are loaded from the source platforms' own image servers, and we ask your browser not to tell them where you came from. Profile pictures load from bucket.daosearch.io, our own storage on Cloudflare. Links to Qidian, Discord, RandomTranslator and Narratorr leave DaoSearch, and once you follow one you're covered by that site's policy rather than ours. The same goes for the Google and Discord pages you pass through when you sign in, and for anything you do in our Discord server.

If something here isn't clear, or you think we're holding something we shouldn't be, write to us and we'll answer.