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Kept rooms & your account

Anyone in an anonymous room who has an account can keep it, so its history stays for everyone until the room's kept-until date. Your account also holds your username, your data export and account deletion.

Keep a room​

  • Anyone in the room with an AChat account can keep it, as long as no one else already keeps it. If the room has a password, you enter it first.
  • Keeping a room changes it for everyone in it, and they can see who's keeping it. Your account is recorded as the keeper; the messages you wrote there aren't linked to it.
  • How many rooms you can keep, and for how long, are plan allowances. You can extend a kept room back to that full length, counted from today.
  • A reminder email comes when a kept room's date is coming up.
  • Kept rooms lists every room you keep.

A room can be kept forever only with a grant from an AChat admin. See Admin oversight.

Release a room​

Releasing a room returns it to the default: messages already there keep the expiry they had, and new messages get the default number of days (10 by default).

Rooms you kept in the old AChat stay kept until the same dates, and any extra keep days you'd earned carry over.

Your account​

The Account page has these tabs: Account, Devices, Recovery, Preferences, Storage and Data, plus Team / Family and invites where they apply.

  • Username: change it any time. Anyone adding you from then on searches for the new one, and your old username is free for someone else.
  • Profile photo: replace the photo from your Google account with your own.
  • Export: Data gives you one file with your profile, your contacts and the chats this device can read, built on your device. Keep it somewhere private.

Delete your account​

  1. Open Account, then the Data tab, and choose Delete account.
  2. If you own a group or community, make someone else its owner first.
  3. Read what happens, then type your username to confirm. Google may ask you to sign in again.

Deletion is immediate and permanent:

  • Your username is released straight away.
  • Every linked device is signed out, and your recovery key stops working.
  • Messages you sent stay in other people's chats, marked as from a deleted account.
  • Your anonymous room messages were never linked to the account, so they stay until the room's history ends.
  • Payment records (reference, amount and date) and reports you sent are kept for a set time; the privacy page says how long.
  • A confirmation goes to your Google email address.

Can't sign in? The delete account page explains how to ask the AChat team from the Google email address your account uses.

Achievements​

Account shows Achievements: badges for a finished profile, kept rooms, installing AChat, the Android app and the days you've opened it. They are worked out on your device and don't change your plan.