TopSites: How the List Works

The top list ranks game servers by how many votes they receive. Anyone can add their server; anyone with an account can vote for it, and a server owner can put a vote button in their own launcher or game that needs no account here at all. Server owners can have us notify their game server every time somebody votes, so they can hand out a reward in game.

Vote periods

Votes are counted in vote periods. A vote period is one calendar month, measured in UTC - not your local time, and not the board's configured timezone. The period called 2026-08 runs from 1 August 00:00 UTC to 31 August 23:59:59 UTC.

You may vote for each listing once per period. When a new period starts, everyone becomes eligible to vote for everything again.

What happens at the turn of the month

Shortly after a period ends, a scheduled task closes it out:

1. Each listing's votes for the closed period are added to its all-time score.
2. The individual vote records for that period are discarded.
3. The listing's current-period count resets to zero.

The task runs daily rather than monthly, and it works from "the oldest period that is not the current one" rather than from "last month". That means a missed run, a server outage over a month boundary, or a board timezone ahead of UTC cannot cause a month to be dropped without being counted first. If nothing needs archiving, the task does nothing.

The three numbers

Ranking uses the current period, so the list reflects who is active now rather than who has been listed longest. A server that has been running for five years does not permanently occupy the top slot.

Movement arrows

The small ▲ and ▼ beside a listing's rank show how far it has moved since yesterday. Positions are recorded once a day, shortly after midnight UTC, so the arrows track daily momentum rather than flickering with every vote. No arrow means the listing holds the same position it held yesterday.

Servers that have not opened yet

An owner can announce an opening date, and their server then appears on the launch calendar alongside a countdown on its card. Watch the listing and you will be alerted on the morning it opens.

An upcoming server is ranked and can be voted for like any other. Building an audience before opening day is the reason to announce a date at all, so votes are not held back until launch. Dates can only be set a few months ahead, and an owner can only move one a limited number of times - a date that keeps sliding is not a date.

Ratings are weighted

The rating shown is not a plain average. It is weighted against a prior, so a listing with a single five-star review does not outrank a listing with two hundred reviews averaging 4.6. As a listing collects more ratings, its weighted score converges on its true average.

Withdrawing a vote

You can withdraw a vote. It stops counting towards the ranking immediately.

Withdrawing does not give you a fresh vote for that listing in that period - you may re-cast it, but it still counts once, and if the listing rewards voters in game, it still pays out once. This is deliberate: without it, anyone could withdraw and re-vote in a loop to farm rewards.

Rate limits

• There is a minimum interval between any two votes you cast, anywhere in the directory.
• The interval is per person, not per address, so an office, campus or household on one connection is not sharing a single budget.
• Guests, where guest voting is enabled, are additionally capped per address per day.

Guest voting

Where guest voting is enabled, guests are identified only by IP address. That is a weak identity: everyone behind one router counts as one voter, and anyone switching VPN counts as several. Boards that care about accuracy usually require an account.

What listing owners can see

If you own a listing, Manage listing → Stats shows your votes day by day for the month, clicks on your play link, where your votes came from, your rating breakdown, and a short list of integrity signals: how much of your traffic is guests, whether votes arrived in bursts, how many attempts were turned away, and whether one source or one client is behind an unusual number of them.

The Stats tab is part of TopSites VIP. The tab is on the panel either way and says what is behind it; the figures themselves come with VIP.

Those are counts and percentages only. Owners are never shown who voted, what address anybody came from, or which accounts were refused - those are other people's visitors. Staff see the detail behind the same signals.

A flag is not an accusation. A launcher voting through the API arrives as a guest, an office shares one address, and somebody voting twice in a month is the ordinary case for a refusal. They are worth a look, not a verdict.

What you are told without having to look

• Nobody has voted for you. If a listing has never had a single vote, its owner gets one alert about it a day after listing. Once, never repeated, and never to a server that has not opened yet.
• Your vote rewards are not being delivered. If you have set up the vote callback and your server starts refusing it, you are told after four consecutive failures - the first attempt plus three retries, so at least one voter has gone unrewarded. Once per run of failures, and nothing further until a delivery succeeds.
• The month has reset. Everybody watching a listing is reminded in the first few days of a new period. Never the owner: you are the one person who cannot act on it.

If votes are withdrawn from your listing

Nothing is ever withdrawn automatically. A moderator looks at the evidence and decides, and only then is anybody outside staff told.

If it happens you get one sentence: some votes were removed as coming from linked accounts. No counts, no usernames, no addresses, and nothing about what matched - on a toplist the person running the extra accounts is usually the person whose listing gains from them, so the detail would be an evasion manual. If somebody is meddling with your listing you still learn that much, which is the part you can act on by telling us.

In the worst cases the listing also loses its place in the ranking for the rest of the month. It stays in the directory, keeps its page and keeps its link - players can still find it and play it - but it holds no position, and it is named on the Vote integrity page with the date it returns. That page shows the title and the date and nothing else: no owner, no accounts, no evidence.

Decisions can be taken back. If one is reversed, the votes are counted again, the mark against the listing is removed, the position comes back, the listing comes off that page immediately, and you are told.