The SyntaxHQ story

Prologue

SyntaxHQ has always been one developer building things for the communities they spent their time in, with a community of server owners, testers and friends around them. There was no investor, no office and no master plan, just a habit of noticing something annoying about Discord and trying to fix it.

That habit produced a lot over the years. Some projects grew to hundreds of servers, some barely launched, and a few were shut down on purpose because they no longer matched what we believe in. Every one of them taught something, and most of what's good about PinPal today was learned on a project that came before it. Where you see Recreated, it's a rebuild of how something looked or what it said, made fresh for this page.

A note on how this page was made: for transparency, AI tools helped us sort through years of old announcements and records and helped build this page, including the recreations. The story, facts and final wording were reviewed by the SyntaxHQ team.

Part 1Beginnings

It started around 2022 with General Support, a small Discord server where anyone could ask a question and a friendly staff team would try to help. It taught the first lesson of everything that followed: communities are made of people, and people stay where they feel welcome.

The first real bot came in 2023. AdamBot did a bit of everything: games like Adam Says and Click the Button, memes, weather, polls, moderation, and a 24/7 throwback radio that sat in voice channels and kept one "Now Playing" message updated with live timestamps.

AdamBot is where the fundamentals were learned: commands, sharding, logging, rate limits, and hosting a bot for other people on a free plan, which turned out to matter a lot later.

Part 2Guardian

Anyone who's made a Discord bot knows how hard it is to get it noticed. The big bot lists were full of ads and ranked by votes, so small bots never stood a chance. Guardian Bot List was the answer: ranked by ratings instead of votes, completely ad-free, quick to list on, and tracking every bot's uptime.

Autumn 2023 was its busiest season. The list moved to its own domain and a paid server, response times dropped from about a second to a few milliseconds, and new features shipped almost daily. Growth also brought attention that wasn't friendly: in October 2023 the list suffered its first DDoS attack, the first of many over the following weeks.

Those weeks were a crash course in real infrastructure: firewalls, proxies, SSL, caching and staying calm while everything is on fire. At its worst, the list fended off tens of millions of hostile requests in a single day.

In late October 2023 came Guardian Bot List v2, with a fresh design, a home-made login system and the feature everyone had asked for: dark mode.

A month later a database failure led to a full rewrite, a credits system for promoting bots, and alerts when a listed bot went offline. Then in late 2023 came Guardian Cloud: free bot hosting with servers in Sydney, New York and Texas, because hosting is one of the biggest hurdles for new developers and AdamBot had started on a free host too.

[bot] Loading commands...
[bot] Connected to Discord
[bot] Logged in, serving 12 servers
[bot] Heartbeat OK
[bot] Heartbeat OK
Server Started: True

December 2023 brought a month where every new bot listed raised money for cancer research, and early 2024 brought auctions and a "Red Team" that invited the community to ethically test our security.

Part 3The Disco era

Spring 2024 was the busiest stretch in our history. A family of "Disco" bots launched in just a few weeks: DiscordKV, free key-value storage from inside Discord; DiscoBump, which shared your server across a network of communities; DiscoTunes, a music bot; and Zenith.app, a levelling bot. Not all of them caught on, and DiscordKV and DiscoTunes were closed within weeks, with everyone's data kept for a month so they could ask for a copy.

On 19 June 2024, after two years and five major versions, Guardian Bot List shut down. The passion that had fuelled it was gone, and ending it properly felt better than letting it rot. Every database was securely deleted, and Zenith.app and DiscoBump closed the same day.

Then people asked for DiscoBump back. It returned on 31 July 2024, this time verified, and grew faster than anything before it: 100 servers by mid-August, 200 by the end of the month, 300 by October.

It wasn't all smooth. In October 2024 a ransomware attack wiped our databases overnight. Because we only ever stored configuration, never personal information, it meant a night of restoring backups rather than a data leak. It's the clearest proof we have that collecting as little as possible matters. Around the same time came a few experiments, like AllBump!, which bumped your server everywhere at once, and CloakBot, which helped servers spot risky users from community reports.

Part 4guilds.fyi

On 1 September 2024 we opened guilds.fyi, a Discord server list where "no server is too small or too niche". It had touches no other list had: a "How Chatty" scale that described a server's activity from "like a quiet library" to "like an international summit", a pinboard, languages, analytics that only ever counted when messages were sent, and weekly auctions for the top spots.

A full revamp arrived in December 2024, and through 2025 it gained referrals, verification, a plain-language privacy policy and 99.8% uptime. By its first birthday in September 2025 it listed 140 servers and tracked more than a million messages a month.

Part 5PinPal

PinPal is born · October 2024

Running communities had taught us one small but constant frustration: important messages get buried. Sticky bots existed, but they limited free servers to a single sticky, charged for embeds, or stamped a header on every message. So in October 2024 a new bot was built. During development it was called Peakly.

It launched as PinPal on 27 October 2024, free, with embeds and buttons, and a way to stick one message across every channel at once.

The climb · 2025

For months PinPal grew quietly while DiscoBump and guilds.fyi took the spotlight. In February 2025 we noticed it was in 75 servers and got it verified. That same month brought Sticky Delay, which waits for chat to settle before reposting. It's still at the heart of how PinPal works.

Then the curve bent upwards: 100 servers in March, 200 in May, 500 in July. In May 2025 the founder stepped back for a while to focus on life outside Discord, and PinPal kept growing on its own. On 17 July 2025 it overtook DiscoBump, adding 100 servers in two and a half weeks.

On 2 August 2025, at 650 servers, PinPal got its biggest update yet to prepare for 1,000: sharding, custom embed colours, editing pins, an all-in-one /setup, and share codes for copying a setup to another server. Weeks later came presets, a cleaner design across every command and a rebuilt way to delete your data. At the end of August came our first real push for votes, aiming for the top spot in top.gg's Pinned Messages category.

1,000 servers · 14 September 2025

On 14 September 2025, PinPal passed 1,000 servers. October brought nominations in top.gg's awards of the year, a /debug command that checks a channel's setup and permissions, a consistent new look across the bot, and the ability to pin in threads and forum channels.

All in on PinPal · late 2025 to 2026

To focus on what was working, AllBump! and Zenith.app were retired in October 2025. On 16 December 2025, DiscoBump followed. Its growth had slowed, but the real reason was that we no longer believed bump bots help communities grow: spam-driven promotion doesn't serve server owners. It stayed online for a month and pointed everyone elsewhere.

Then guilds.fyi had to go too. Despite repeated clean-ups, harmful and spammy listings had come to far outnumber genuine communities, including some that broke Discord's rules. Keeping it running would have meant compromising the values SyntaxHQ started with, so in 2026 it was shut down. It was hard to end two projects so close together, but it left every hour free for the tool that was genuinely helping communities stay organised and welcoming.

So many apps end up compromising their original mission to chase growth. We'd rather close something than watch it become that.

The 2026 rebuild

With everything focused on one product, PinPal was rebuilt almost from scratch in 2026. Nearly every part of it changed:

• A new setup panel. /setup became one dashboard for every pin in the server, with an editor for the message, up to 25 channels, timing, buttons and more, built on Discord's newest message components.
• A new reposting engine. One queue now handles every channel's repost timer, so even thousands of busy channels cost almost nothing while they wait.
• More ways to pin. Text or embeds with buttons, rotating messages, live variables like member counts and countdowns, and a custom name and avatar for each pin.
• Built for teams. A pin manager role so moderators can help, presets and share codes, Create Pin from any message, and a /debug that explains exactly what's wrong.
• Safer by design. A small 🔍 button on pins tells members the message comes from their server, not PinPal, and how to spot scams. Custom avatars go straight to Discord and are never stored by us.
• Help in the right place. A help hub with topics and quick answers, a friendlier welcome message for new servers, and tools to see and delete your own data.

●You used /setup

PinPalAPPToday at 9:30 PM

New pinWrite a message, choose channels, then save.

Message 1 Embed · 📜 Server rules

ChannelsUp to 25 channels or threads.

# rules# general

Repost timingReposts 3 seconds after new messages

Change

Link buttons📜 Full rules, 🎭 Get roles

Edit

Save to 2 channelsPreviewExportBack

Only you can see this • Dismiss message

This website was rebuilt alongside it, with interactive walkthroughs that recreate Discord right on the page, honest comparisons, and docs for every feature.

Premium · 2026

For years almost everything we made was free, paid for out of pocket. In 2026 PinPal launched an optional Premium plan for servers that want more, such as rotating messages, variables, a custom look and room for many more pins. The essentials stay free for every server, and servers that had more pins before the free limit existed keep all of them running.

In October 2026, PinPal welcomed its very first Premium subscribers. It's a small number, but after years of building nearly everything for free, it means a lot.

Today

PinPal is now used in more than 6,000 servers and has thousands of votes on top.gg. It's the only thing SyntaxHQ makes, and every bit of experience from the projects before it, from handling attacks to deleting data properly to listening when the community asks for something, goes into it.

The story at a glance

1. ~2022General Support and Guardian Bot List begin.
2. 2023AdamBot launches.
3. Oct 2023Guardian Bot List v2, and the first DDoS attacks.
4. Late 2023Guardian Cloud offers free hosting.
5. Spring 2024DiscordKV, DiscoBump, DiscoTunes and Zenith.app.
6. 19 Jun 2024Guardian Bot List shuts down; every database is deleted.
7. 31 Jul 2024DiscoBump returns, verified.
8. 1 Sep 2024guilds.fyi opens.
9. 27 Oct 2024PinPal launches.
10. Feb 2025PinPal is verified; Sticky Delay arrives.
11. 17 Jul 2025PinPal overtakes DiscoBump.
12. 2 Aug 2025PinPal's biggest update so far, at 650 servers.
13. 14 Sep 2025PinPal reaches 1,000 servers.
14. Oct 2025Threads and forums, /debug, and top.gg award nominations.
15. 16 Dec 2025DiscoBump shuts down.
16. 2026guilds.fyi shuts down; PinPal becomes our only focus.
17. 2026PinPal is rebuilt, along with a new website.
18. 2026Premium launches; PinPal passes 6,000 servers.
19. Oct 2026PinPal's first Premium subscribers.

What we learned

What we stand for

• Free where it counts. The core of what we build stays free. Premium adds extras; it never holds the basics hostage.
• Privacy by default. We store as little as we can, never sell data, and give people real tools to see and delete what we have.
• Honesty. Clear announcements, clear prices, and clear reasons when something changes, breaks or ends.
• Community first. Support, feedback and ideas all start in our Discord server.
• Only build what we believe in. If a project stops helping communities, we'd rather end it than compromise.

Thank you

To everyone who played Adam Says, listed a bot on Guardian, hosted on Guardian Cloud, bumped with DiscoBump, levelled up with Zenith, listed a server on guilds.fyi or pinned a message with PinPal: thank you. This story is yours as much as ours.