Terms of use

Hotbar is operated by Rodrigo José Branco Batista (tax number 255179383). Reach us at support@hotbar.gg or through the contact page.

That address is also the single point of contact the Digital Services Act asks for: for you, under Article 12, and for Member State authorities, the Commission and the European Board for Digital Services, under Article 11. It is read by a person and there is no other channel behind it. We deal with all of it in English or Portuguese; write in whichever you prefer, and we will answer in one of the two.

Hotbar is not an official Minecraft service. It is not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.

You need an account to publish, comment or take part socially, and you need to link a Minecraft account before you can do any of those. That link is what lets us keep someone who has been removed from simply coming back with a new email; it is not optional and there is no way around it.

One person, one account. You are responsible for what happens under yours.

You keep every right you had in what you upload. To show it on the site, you give us permission to store it, display it, and let others download it where you have made it downloadable — and nothing more. That permission ends when the publication does, except for copies we are required to keep for a moderation record.

By publishing, you are saying it is yours to publish. If you built on someone else’s work, credit them and respect the licence they gave.

• Anything unlawful, or anything that infringes someone else's rights.
• Sexual content involving minors, or any content that sexualises them. This is reported, not just removed.
• Harassment, threats, or content that targets a person or a group.
• Malware, or files that do something other than what they claim.
• Automated mass uploading, scraping, or anything built to get around the limits.

That is the short version. The full one — six rules, with what counts under each — is the site rules, and it is part of these terms. Every moderation decision names one of those six.

If you find something here that breaks the law, use the notice form. It needs no account, because the person whose rights are affected usually does not have one. Anything else — something against the rules but not against the law — goes through the report button on the page itself.

When something breaks a rule we can take the content down, warn you, limit part of what you can do — publishing, commenting, taking part, reporting — for a stated time or until we lift it, or close the account. We use the smallest of those that answers what happened, and most of the time that is the first one and nothing else.

Every decision arrives in writing, on your account page, and says what was done, what it was about, which of the six rules it rests on, that it was decided by a person and not by any automated means — there is no filter making these calls here — and how to contest it.

Contesting it is free and open for six months from the day of the decision. You appeal from the same place the decision appeared, in your own words; it is read by a person, and by a different one than decided it wherever there is more than one of us. If we got it wrong we say so and put things back as they were.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you can take the dispute to a body certified for out-of-court dispute settlement under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act — those bodies are certified by the Digital Services Coordinator of each Member State, which for us is ANACOM, and we will take part in good faith. That route is optional and costs you nothing to consider; it does not stop you from going to court, and neither of them replaces the appeal above.

The same machinery can be aimed the wrong way, and it works both ways: after a warning, we can suspend an account that keeps publishing plainly unlawful content, and suspend the ability to report for someone who keeps sending reports that are plainly unfounded. Both are temporary, both are told to you with the reason, and both can be appealed like anything else.

Removing something never means we keep it — content taken down stays only as the record of the decision.

Every account has a storage allowance, shown on your account page. Paid plans give more, and the top plan can buy extra by the gigabyte.

Going over your allowance never deletes anything. What you have published stays published and stays downloadable — you simply cannot publish more until you free some space. That is true whether you went over by dropping a plan, by a payment failing, or by choosing to buy less extra space.

Plans are billed monthly or yearly through Stripe, in advance. A yearly plan is priced at ten months rather than twelve.

Changing plan mid-period is settled by proration: you are credited for what you paid and did not use, and charged for what is left of the period. Small adjustments usually ride on your next invoice; larger ones are charged at the time, and if that payment fails, the change does not happen — nothing is granted before it is paid for.

If a renewal fails, the account returns to the free plan immediately and keeps everything it had. If a later attempt succeeds, the plan comes back on its own. Cancelling keeps the plan until the end of the period you already paid for.

What can be refunded, and when, is in the refund policy.

Some builds and maps are listed here as paid. Hotbar does not sell them, does not take the money and is not a party to the purchase: the listing carries a link to the store where the sale happens, the price is whatever that store says, and the sale is governed by that store's own terms. If the link does not lead to the thing, report the listing; that is what the report reason for it is for.

Lists you can sort — newest, most downloaded, most liked — are exactly what they say and nothing else is mixed in. Nowhere on this site does paying change where something appears.

The one place an ordering is computed is the “others like this” row on a publication’s page. It is built from four things, in this order of weight:

• Whether the same people tended to open, download, like, save or collect both — the strongest signal, and it needs at least three people in common before it counts at all, so that one person's browsing cannot invent a connection.
• How alike the two names are.
• How many tags they share, as a proportion of the smaller set.
• Whether they are in the same category.

Two things that are deliberately not in that list. Age is one: there is no bonus for being recent and no cut-off for being old, so a three-year-old publication that fits better is placed higher than a new one that fits worse. Recency only fills the seats nothing else claimed. Who you are is the other: the row is the same for everyone looking at that page, because what is computed is how two publications relate — never a profile of you.

One creator takes at most two of the seats, so that a prolific account cannot hold the whole row.

Hotbar is offered as it stands. We try to keep it up and to keep your files safe, and we do not promise it will never be down or never lose anything. Keep your own copy of anything you would mind losing — that is true of every service, and it is true here.

We are liable for damage we cause deliberately or by gross negligence, and for anything the law does not let us exclude. Beyond that, our liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the problem. If you are a consumer, none of this takes away rights the law gives you.

You can delete your account at any time from your account page. We can close an account that breaks these terms, and we will say why.

If these terms change in a way that matters, the date at the top changes, we say so on the site, and the change does not apply to you before you have had a chance to read it.

Portuguese law applies, and if you are a consumer you keep the protections of the law where you live and can bring a case in your own courts. For a dispute about money — a charge, a refund, a plan — you can also go to a consumer arbitration body: in Portugal, the centre with jurisdiction over our registered seat, and the Direção-Geral do Consumidor can tell you which that is. For a dispute about a moderation decision, the route is the one in section 5.