Step 1: the ten seconds that create your link
The homepage has one field. Type a name and you get back three things: a link, a 4-digit PIN, and a session that keeps you signed in on that browser.
The name is public, and it isn't a username. It becomes the headline on your link page ("Send Maya an anonymous message"), the letter in the avatar circle, the name on your Story images, and half of your recovery credentials. Keep email addresses and phone numbers out of it. It locks on creation; there is no rename.
The link looks like secretmessageonline.com/b/3f9a1c0d7b2e5. Those 13 hex characters are random and server-generated, never derived from your name, so nobody guesses a stranger's link.
Your PIN, and what to do the moment you lose it
The PIN appears exactly once, on the card shown right after your link is created. Screenshot it. Not "remember it". Screenshot it. There is no account here and so no password reset: we can't mail you a new PIN or look yours up, because we store a salted hash rather than the number.
Lost the PIN but still signed in on the device you made the board on? Nothing is broken. You have only lost the way back in from anywhere else, so don't clear cookies here. Lost the PIN and the session? The board is unreachable, not deleted. Make a new one and repoint your bio. Nobody else gets into the old one either.
Being signed in means one signed cookie in one browser, good for a year. Ordinary things end it: another device or browser, an incognito window you close, clearing site data, tapping Log out. Your inbox then sends you to the recovery page, which matches name and PIN against the most recent boards using that name, so distinctive names recover more reliably. It allows about ten tries every ten minutes, because four digits is ten thousand combinations.
Step 2: putting the link where people will tap it
A plain URL, with nothing for the sender to install. It has to go in the platform's dedicated link field; typed into a free-text bio line it renders as dead text.
- Instagram: the Links field in Edit profile. Exact taps in the Instagram anonymous messages guide.
- TikTok: the Website field in Edit profile, plus a pinned video telling people it's there. See the TikTok bio link guide.
- Snapchat and WhatsApp: no real bio field. Post the URL in a Status or a Snap.
- X, Threads, Bluesky, Discord: bio field or pinned post.
The Story loop, which is the part that works
A bio link is passive, and almost nobody reads a bio twice. The loop is what pulls messages in: post a Story with a specific question and a sticker pointing at your bio, wait a few hours, run the answers you like through the Story image generator, post those back. Every reshared answer proves the link works and invites whoever hasn't used it. New question every few days.
Specific beats generic. "Send me anonymous messages" asks people to invent a topic; "what's one thing I should stop posting?" hands them a sentence to finish. The loop can't manufacture an audience, though. It converts attention rather than creating it.
Step 3: what the inbox shows
A reverse-chronological list of your most recent messages, up to the last hundred. Each card shows the word Anonymous, a relative timestamp, the message text (capped at 500 characters), a menu holding Report and Delete, and a Share to Story button. There is no unread badge and no counter, which we would rather say out loud than have you hunt for it. Two tabs sit above the list: Inbox and Filtered, the latter carrying a count.
Why a message lands in Filtered
Every message is checked before it is stored, on our own servers, with plain pattern matching. Never an outside AI service, so no third party holds what people write to you. Three passes:
- Personal information: email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, IBANs, card-shaped digit strings.
- A profanity wordlist, as a soft signal only. Swearing alone never filters anything; most anonymous messages with a swear word in them are affectionate.
- Severe-content patterns: threats of violence, self-harm bait, sexual violence, hate slurs, across English, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, French, Filipino, Indonesian, and German.
Hits from the first and third pass go to Filtered, as does anything matching your muted keywords. Content sexualizing children is blocked outright: not filtered, not stored, never in any folder.
Filtered is a holding area, not a shredder. Pattern matching gets things wrong both ways: a friend sending their new number trips the phone rule, a joke about a movie plot trips a violence pattern. If a message crosses from annoying into frightening, report it and use our safety page. If someone writes about hurting themselves or you, contact emergency services; in the US, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts.
Turning a message into a Story image
Share to Story renders a 1080x1920 PNG, exactly the Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat frame, so nothing gets cropped. It carries the message in large type, a line naming you as the recipient, and "Send me one too" with your link at the bottom. Two limits: it shows roughly the first 220 characters, so long messages get trimmed, and on desktop it downloads the PNG instead of opening a share sheet.
Push notifications and installing the app
There is no App Store version and there won't be. The site is a Progressive Web App, so your browser installs it: Add to Home Screen from Safari's share menu on iPhone, Install appfrom Chrome's menu on Android. That install is also what makes notifications work on iPhone, since Apple allows web push only for home-screen sites. Tap Allow when asked, and treat notifications as a convenience, not a guarantee: phones throttle background delivery hard.
Step 4: the controls you have
- Block a sender. Senders have no accounts, so blocking works against the connection a message came from. Blocked messages stop arriving and the sender is never told. Honest limit: switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data makes them look new.
- Mute keywords. A comma-separated list in your settings, case-insensitive and matched anywhere in the text, so "ex" also catches "excellent".
- Delete a message. From the card menu. A real delete, not a hide, and permanent.
- Report a message. Also in the card menu. Report before you delete when something is threatening; a deleted message tells us nothing.
- Make the board private. A settings toggle that keeps it out of search engines. Direct-link visitors can still send.
- Delete the board. Behind a typed confirmation at the bottom of settings. Board, messages, and push subscriptions go together, and the link dies immediately.
Either way, messages auto-delete after 90 days, Filtered included. Screenshot anything you want to keep.
What the sender sees, and what they don't
Someone tapping your link gets one page: your name, a circle with your initial, your bio if you wrote one, a 500-character box with a counter, and a send button, plus maybe a quick bot check. No account, no email, no name.
Then they see one word: sent. They see it whether the message was delivered, routed to Filtered, or dropped because they're blocked, since a sender who could tell those apart could test their way around the filter. They never see your inbox, whether you read theirs, or whether you blocked them.
You never see who sent anything either: no name, no IP, no city, no device, and no paid "reveal the sender" upgrade, now or ever. We do keep coarse metadata server-side, the sender's IP, country, and device type, because rate limiting, blocking, and lawful requests about credible threats need it. The privacy policy has the rest.
Troubleshooting
I lost my PIN
Still signed in on the device you made the board on? Keep using it and don't clear cookies. Signed out too? It can't be recovered. Make a new board and repoint your bio.
I lost my link
Open your inbox on the device that's still signed in; it sits at the top with a copy button. Signed out, use your name and PIN to recover.
Nobody is sending me anything
Usually distribution, not a bug. Is the link genuinely clickable? Have you told anyone it exists? Does it open your own page from someone else's phone? One Story with a specific question fixes this more often than anything.
A message I was expecting never showed up
Check Filtered first. That's where most missing messages are, and one phone number in an otherwise sweet message is enough. Then check your muted keywords. If it is genuinely absent, the sender may have hit a rate limit: 5 messages a minute per sender, 20 a day to you from that sender. A send that fails outright shows an error, so ask what their screen said.
My link isn't clickable
Move it into the platform's dedicated link or website field. If outside links are blocked entirely, put the URL in a pinned post and ask people to copy it.
How do I start over?
While you're signed in, creating a board hands you back the one you already have, so a double tap can't leave you with two inboxes and one bio link. Log out first, then create the new board, update your bio, and delete the old one. Renaming isn't possible, so this is how you change your name too.
Something else is broken
Email us from the contact page. Never send your PIN, and be suspicious of anyone who asks, us included.