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Apologies for the delay.
Ergo: disingenuous troll post.
Moral of story: accuracy matters, even when shit posting.
And yes, we do not keep any unencrypted original_ip_address in any database or log files, to the best of our knowledge (because if we intentionally did, what would be the point in going through the effort of encryption?). The original IP is used only to create the emojis, and is not written to any database or file.
In terms of why we go through the effort to store anything at all, even if encrypted: mostly to combat some spammy or malicious comments or bots, so we can block a single emojified IP address that posts a lot of crap in any 24 hour period.
But you're right, ultimately, you kind of have to trust that it works the way we say it does, and that we don't have a reason to want to have access to your personal information such as IP addresses or emails, and we don't want to secretly store such information. But like on any other website on the rest of the internet, the only real defense, if you're really worried, is to use a VPN or Tor, so we never even have access to your IP address in the first place and you don't even have to trust us to not ever store it.
If you're interested in technical details about whether this is strong enough, would welcome your feedback. Tldr, it is intended to be fairly cryptographically and practically secure. [If you're technically inclined, here are the boring details: your IP address is first 'salted' (sprinkled) with a random sequence of 40 letters that gets regenerated approximately daily, then 'hashed' with SHA384 (akin to a one-way encryption that can not be reversed), and then three partial character sequences of the hash are converted into three out of more than 1000 emojis. And even if it was theoretically possible to reverse engineer it, approximately after a day the old 'salt' is deleted and a new one is generated.]
Hope that helps and always happy for feedback and more tests.
Caveat emptor, etc. That said, good luck on your room mate hunt! :)
Further, this pseudonymous IP encryption key gets reset and thrown away every 24-48 hours, so even if we were really clever and really wanted to we couldn't deduce your actual IP from this after a day or two.
Of course, end of the day, you kind of have to trust us on this and despite our measures to safeguard your anonymity and using an encrypted https connection, it's theoretically probably possible for tracking at your ISP, law school, firm or Pegasus-spying or NSA level to deduce posts that you make.
In short, if you're really really really worried about this or you're leaking state secrets, probably don't use the internet, or if you are, use a VPN and/or Tor and other measures to protect your anonymity...