How VoteRank Rankings Work

Every list on VoteRank is ordered by the same three things, in strict order of importance:

• Votes this month. This decides the ranking. One more monthly vote puts a listing above every listing with fewer, whatever else is true about them.
• Lifetime votes. Only used to order listings with the same monthly total — which mostly matters in the first days of a month, before new votes have separated the list.
• Live player count. Only used when both vote totals are level. A busy server can never outrank one with more votes, and an online server sorts above an offline one when everything else is equal.

Listings that are level on all three share a rank number. Nothing else feeds the score: not payment, not account age, not reviews, not how long a listing has been on the site.

Monthly vote counts reset to zero at 00:05 UTC on the 1st of every month. Lifetime totals are kept. The reset is what gives a new server a real chance: it competes on this month’s votes, not on years of accumulated history.

Between resets the ranking is live. A counted vote moves a listing immediately; there is no daily batch.

• Anyone can vote for any listing from its vote page. You do not need an account.
• Each person can vote for a given listing once per cooldown window: 12 hours by default, or 24 hours if the server owner has chosen the longer cooldown. You can vote for as many different listings as you like.
• Some servers reward votes in game. You enter your in-game name before voting and the server delivers the reward once the vote is counted. Rewards are run by the server, not by VoteRank.

• Every vote must pass an hCaptcha check before it is counted. In production, voting is switched off entirely if the captcha is not configured — the vote endpoint is never left open.
• The cooldown is enforced against a one-way hash of the voter's IP address and, when signed in, their account, so neither a new browser nor a new account resets it on its own.

If you believe a listing is gaming its votes, report it through the contact form and we will look at the vote history.

Player counts are read from the source, every few minutes, wherever the game allows it:

• Minecraft servers through the Server List Ping protocol — the same request your client makes on the multiplayer screen.
• Rust and Counter-Strike servers through Valve's A2S query protocol.
• FiveM servers through each server's own status endpoint.
• Official Tibia worlds through TibiaData.
• Steam games through Steam's concurrent-player data, and streamers through the Twitch, Kick and YouTube APIs.
• Games with no standard status protocol, including most RuneScape private servers, can report their own count to our API, authenticated with a key only the listing owner has. Those reports are rate-limited.

Each listing shows when its count was last checked. If a server stops answering, it is shown as offline rather than with an old number.

• Reviews need a signed-in account, and each account can leave one review per listing. Writing again updates your existing review.
• Owners cannot review their own listing. They can post a public reply under any review.
• The star rating is the average of all reviews. It is shown on the listing and can be used to sort a list, but it does not change the default ranking.

VoteRank is funded by advertising and Premium listings. Neither buys position:

• Sponsored rows appear above a toplist with an AD badge where the rank number would be. They never take a rank, so the first numbered row is genuinely #1.
• Premium highlights a listing in gold wherever it already appears. It does not move it.
• Banner ads are labelled and sold per click or per thousand views. Details are on the advertising page.

Listings go live as soon as they are submitted. Some entries were compiled from public sources before their owners joined and are marked as unclaimed; an owner can claim one and take over its details. Listings that break the terms can be suspended and drop off every list.