TopSites: How Toplist Rankings Work, and How to Read Them

Every toplist puts servers in an order and almost none of them say how. This page says how ours works, what the other common methods are good at, and what each one hides - so you can read any list, including this one, with the right amount of suspicion.

The three ways a list can be ordered

By votes. Players click a button; the server with the most clicks goes first. It measures how well a server can mobilise the players it already has, which is a real signal - a server nobody plays cannot win one - but it is a popularity contest with a turnout problem, and it is the method most worth gaming.

By population. Some lists count players online, usually by reading a Discord member count or an API the server itself provides. It answers the question players actually have. It is also the number a server operator has the most direct control over, and a Discord with fourteen thousand members says nothing about how many of them logged in this year.

By payment. Some lists sell the top slots outright, and some sell them quietly. This is not always wrong - it is only wrong when it is not disclosed - but if a list has a premium tier and does not say plainly what it changes, assume it changes the order.

What this list does

Votes, reset on the first of every month at midnight UTC. One vote per person per server per month. Last month's votes roll into an all-time score and stop affecting the visible order, so what you are reading is who is active now rather than who was busy in 2019.

TopSites VIP exists and is paid for. It changes how a listing looks and what it can do - artwork, statistics, working links in the description. It has never moved a listing up by a single place, and the code that orders the ranking does not know whether a listing is VIP.

What we publish that you can check

The weakness of a vote-ranked list is vote manipulation, so the checks are published rather than described vaguely:

• How many votes were counted this month, board-wide.
• How many attempts the checks turned away.
• How many votes were withdrawn after a moderator reviewed them.
• Which listings are currently out of the ranking, and the date they return.

That last one is the part most lists will not do. It is on the vote integrity page, it names the listing and the date and nothing else, and it comes off the moment a decision is reversed.

We do not publish which signals the detector uses or where the lines are drawn. A new server's voters are all new accounts because the server is new, and publishing the thresholds would hand the manual to exactly the people the checks exist to catch.

How to read any toplist, including this one

• Check what the paid tier buys. If the page does not say, assume it buys position.
• Check whether the ranking resets. An all-time list is a list of servers that were popular once.
• Check the reviews, not the rank. A server at number four with twenty honest reviews tells you more than a server at number one with none.
• Join the Discord before you download. Every list is a directory, not a guarantee. Nobody vets the servers on any of them, and that includes us.
• Look at the date. A ranking with no period attached to it is a ranking that has not been recalculated in a while.

If you think something is wrong

Report the listing from its own page. It reaches the same people who handle the vote checks, and a report from somebody who plays on a server is worth more than any signal a detector produces.