THIS IS A WARNING POST, NOT A BOT. I’m not arguing with the creators and I’m not going to tell the platforms what to do. I want to warn the users — you decide what to do with this information.

Context:

Due to the tightening of censorship on JAI (retroactive rules), character creators are moving to Chub, Wyvern, and Saucepan. There are no issues with Chub and Wyvern: the definitions are open there, and the card and chat can be downloaded and transferred to SillyTavern.

Saucepan is a different story: there you can't. The fact is that I personally checked: In Saucepan when deleting a character, your chat is available to you as a user. BUT. You can't continue it and get a character definition or even a picture of it.

An contradiction that you’re not warned about:

Yes, the creator has every right to hide the definition, disable the proxy, and delete the character whenever they want. I'm not going to argue with that—it's his right.

But look at the distribution of losses:

The creator deletes the character and loses an audience — that's it. He still has the backup, the files, the texts. He can re-upload it anywhere, at any time.

The user can lose a many of correspondence, the emotional attachment, and the ability to talk to this character at all. User doesn't have a backup. And if the definition was closed, user won't be able to make one later. Ever. The creator still has a backup copy, files, and texts. He can put it all over again anywhere at any time.

The author has the switch, but the light goes out for you.

Platforms honestly warn authors: "turn on the proxy — the character will be stolen."But no one warns users that the character and the chat can disappear forever at any moment. The only warning is the ToS — which nobody reads.

What this leads to in reality: people become attached to characters, invest hundreds of messages and mental strength in chats. And then the author leaves, or they get banned, or the platform’s rules change (this has already happened on JAI with popular characters that the authors deleted without explanation). And suddenly the person is left with nothing. In my opinion, a character with a closed definition on a platform without chat protection is a time bomb with no display. It’s not guaranteed to go off. But you won’t know when.

At best, it’s a disappointment and a ruined mood for a week. In the worst‐case scenario, people for whom the character was a support during a difficult period may need a therapist to deal with the fallout. I’m not exaggerating for drama — I’m just calling things what they are.

Why I stick with Janitor

Definitions are open — download the card in SillyTavern and chat locally;

closed, but proxy is enabled — you can extract the definition;

closed without a proxy — there are also ways (clever prompts, and this is not [OOC:]);

The main thing: when a character is deleted by the author or the platform, your chat is not deleted. You can continue communicating, save the chat, and get a definition.

This is what saved my favorite characters. Saucepan, to be fair, is not a complete dead end: a bot with a fully open definition can be copied. But Saucepan allows authors to hide the definition partially. You can still make a copy, but you get a broken one: a character that remembers only part of who it was. A partial backup is not a backup. It's a farewell letter that fades out mid-sentence.

Someone will say: “Saucepan is good guys, they don’t ban or delete.” Today — yes. But JAI in 2023–2024 were exactly those "good guys"; people fled there to escape the censorship of Character.AI. In 2025, image censorship arrived here, along with bans and retroactive rules. No one can guarantee that Saucepan won’t follow the same path when it grows, needs bigger servers, and takes on investors. I’m not claiming that this will happen — I’m claiming that it can’t be ruled out. And the closed definitions mean that if this happens, the losses will be irreversible.

On JAI, after each tightening, people could at least take their characters with them. With closed definitions, they won’t be able to at all.

What you can do:

As a user, you can copy characters and chats — not to appropriate someone else’s work, but to protect your own. In SillyTavern or private copies, you decide the fate of the characters, not the author or the platform. The author is free to delete their bot as many times as they like — your copy won’t disappear because of that.

Yes, this violates the author’s right to control the distribution of their text. I won’t pretend that it doesn’t. Everyone decides for themselves where their boundary lies. I’m saying only one thing: if you’re investing emotions in a character whose power switch is in someone else’s hands, you have the right to know that the switch exists.

What I would suggest to the platforms:

1. An honest warning in the chat: “The character may be deleted by the author or the platform at any time.” You warn authors about theft — warn users about the loss as well.

2. Don’t delete character definitions from chats with a deleted bot: let the user continue the conversation. This is cheap (a card — kilobytes versus gigabytes of chats that you already store), it builds trust, and it reduces the motivation to copy.

3. Do not delete the page of a popular character when the author is banned or deletes it: you can disable comments and hide the creator’s name, but leave people the opportunity to communicate.

4. The right to a private copy (fork) of a public character — directly on the platform. The mechanics are similar to forks on GitHub: the original belongs to the author, but your personal copy survives its deletion. Conditions:

the copy is strictly private: only you can interact with it; you cannot publish it or reveal its definition — the author still controls the public image of the character;

the definition remains hidden if the author has hidden it: you do not receive the text — you receive a guarantee that the character will not disappear from your library.

A copy can only be made while the character is public: after deletion, new forks are unavailable, but the ones that have already been made still exist.

Yes, this won’t save you from the death of the platform itself — only a local ST can do that. But the author leaving or getting banned happens orders of magnitude more often than the server being shut down. A private fork decouples the character’s fate from the fate of the author’s account: if the author was banned for their behavior, but the characters didn’t violate anything — why should the users suffer? (If the content itself is removed for violating the rules, the platform may retain the right to disable copies as well; the main thing is that this should be a clearly stated rule, not an unspoken surprise.)

And it's important: this right should work by default, not be an "allow copying" checkbox that a wary author will never tick. Otherwise we end up right back where we started.

I'm not certain I'm right about everything — and I can’t decide for you where the line lies between “the author’s rights” and “a person’s right not to lose what they’ve come to love.” But I had to warn you. You have been warned.