About VoteRank

Between 2011 and 2019 we ran rspslist.net, gamingtoplist.net and gaming-toplist.com. Those sites ranked RuneScape private servers and, later, game servers more broadly, through most of the decade that scene was at its loudest. We handled the vote-farming arms race, the traffic spikes when a big server launched, the arguments about whether a listing was a duplicate, and the endless negotiation over what counts as a fair ranking.

Then we stopped. Life moved on and the sites wound down. What did not go anywhere is the understanding of how these communities work — what server owners actually need, where toplists quietly cheat their users, and which shortcuts look clever for a month and poison the site for years.

The scene never died; the tooling around it just got worse. Most toplists today are the same PHP script from 2008 with more ads bolted on, showing player counts a server owner typed in by hand, selling rank positions to whoever pays, and hiding it all behind a page that takes six seconds to load on a phone.

We thought we could do considerably better with the experience we already have and the tools that exist now. So VoteRank is the same idea, rebuilt properly and aimed wider — not just RSPS, but Minecraft, WoW, FiveM, Rust, Metin2, Tibia, Counter-Strike, Discord communities, Steam and mobile games, and streamers.

Rank is votes cast in the current calendar month, with live player count breaking ties. That is the whole formula, and it resets on the 1st so a server that gets going today can top its list this month.

Paid placement does not move you up. Premium highlights a listing in gold so it catches the eye; advertising buys a labelled slot at the top of a list. Neither touches the ranking, and both are marked as what they are. A toplist where money buys position is not a toplist, it is a price list, and everyone reading it eventually works that out.

Player counts are queried live from the source: the Minecraft Server List Ping protocol for Minecraft, Valve’s A2S for Rust and Counter-Strike, the FiveM endpoint for FiveM, TibiaData for Tibia worlds, and the Steam and Twitch APIs for games and channels. If a server is down, the listing says so rather than showing yesterday’s number.

Listing views are counted as unique visitors, one person per day, not raw hits. It makes our numbers look smaller and makes them mean something.

More lists, deeper integrations, and better tools for the people who run servers — that is where the work is going. If something is missing or broken, tell us: we read everything that comes through the contact form, and a fair amount of what is on the site now exists because someone complained about the version before it.