RaGEZONE Development Forums

[MentaL]

RaGEZONE Top Sites​

A ranked directory for the people who actually run servers — live rank badges you can embed anywhere, signed vote callbacks so you can reward your players in-game, an API for your launcher, and a listing page built to be found.

Private Server List 2026 - Ranked Monthly by Player Votes

Discover the biggest and best private servers for your favorite MMORPG games at RaGEZONE. Enjoy top-tier gameplay, custom content, and a thriving gaming community.

forum.ragezone.com

Listing is free, and it stays free. It takes about two minutes.

How the ranking works​

• Ranked by player votes. One vote per member, per listing, per calendar month (UTC).
• Votes reset on the 1st of every month. Nobody sits at the top on votes from three years ago — a server that's active now outranks one that peaked in 2019, and a brand-new listing with a good first month lands straight near the top.
• Old votes aren't thrown away. They bank into your all-time score, and each month's winners are kept forever in the Hall of Fame.
• Movement arrows. Every card shows how far it's climbed or fallen since yesterday — a green ▲ or red ▼ under the rank. Positions are recorded once a day, so the arrows track real momentum instead of flickering with every vote.
• Ratings and reviews are separate from votes. Members review your server out of five stars, weighted so one drive-by five-star can't beat a track record.

The ranking is not for sale. There's a paid VIP option that changes how your listing looks and links. It does not move you up a single place, and it says so on its own page. Votes decide the order. Nothing else does.

Your listing page​

Every listing gets its own page: your logo, your banner, a showcase image, your description, your play link, your screenshots, and player reviews you can reply to. It's indexed by search engines, so someone searching for a private server for your game can find you through us.

Your banner is placement, not decoration​

Your 728×90 banner shows on your card in the main directory, on your game's category page, and full-width across the top of your listing page. Every visitor browsing the list sees it before they read a word.

We serve it in a way ad-blockers don't eat. Most "banner" slots on the internet are invisible to anyone running Brave or uBlock, which on a gaming audience is a large share of your traffic. Ours paint for everyone.

Banners take animated GIF, WebP — and MP4 video up to 2 MB, played silent and looping, exactly like a GIF at a fraction of the size. Upload whatever your artist made. We don't flatten it, we don't re-encode it, and we don't lose your animation.

Your trailer, full width​

Paste any YouTube link into the Trailer field and your listing grows a Trailer tab with the video across the full content width. A minute of gameplay converts a browser into a player better than any paragraph you'll ever write.

Screenshots​

Four screenshots on a free listing, twelve on VIP. Your listing grows a Gallery tab: four across the full width, the rest on a side scroller. Click any one and it opens full size over the page with arrows to move between them.

They appear in alphabetical order by file name, so if the order matters, name them 01-town.jpg, 02-boss.jpg, 03-siege.jpg before uploading. Pick several at once — large images are shrunk to fit and nothing is cropped.

A description tells someone what your server is. A screenshot of a packed town at siege time tells them whether they want to be there.

Categories​

There's a category for every major game — MU Online, Lineage 2, MapleStory, Ragnarok, WoW, Silkroad, Metin2, RuneScape, Audition and dozens more, plus a general Website category for tools, communities and resources.

First server to list in a quiet category takes #1 on the spot.

Your control panel​

Open your listing and hit Manage listing. Everything is on tabs:

• Overview — your rank right now, how far you've moved since yesterday, whether your callbacks are being delivered, and a checklist of anything you haven't set up yet.
• Listing — title, description, play link, custom fields.
• Appearance — logo, banner, showcase image, gallery and trailer, one section each.
• Rewards — the vote callback, your listing key, the Discord webhook, and a Send test callback button.
• Promote — your badge code, a full listing embed, and your vote link.
• TopSites VIP — what it costs, when it runs out, what renewing does to that date.
• Stats — clicks, votes day by day, ratings and vote-integrity signals. VIP only — see below.
• Help — the full guides, without leaving the panel.

Getting votes​

Live rank badges​

Every listing gets an embeddable badge: your own logo with your live rank stamped on it. #1 wears gold, #2 silver, #3 bronze.

Drop it on your website, your launcher, your Discord — it's one image tag, and it updates itself as your rank changes. Climb overnight and every badge you've ever posted already shows it by morning.

<a href="https://forum.ragezone.com/topsites/YOUR-ID/">
  <img src="https://forum.ragezone.com/topsites/YOUR-ID/badge" alt="My server on RaGEZONE Top Sites">
</a>

By default it shows your rank within your game's category — "#1 MU Online server" — because that's the claim your players care about. Sitting on a directory-wide podium spot? Add ?scope=overall and say that instead.

Open your listing and hit Embed to copy the code pre-filled.

Your listing link unfurls in posts​

Paste a listing URL into a post and it expands into a card showing the logo, game, vote count and star rating, instead of sitting there as a bare line of text. It applies to posts made or edited from now on; it doesn't rewrite old threads.

Vote pings in your Discord​

Paste a Discord webhook URL on the callback setup page and your server's channel gets a message every time somebody votes. Your community watches the votes roll in, and every ping is a nudge for the next person to go vote too.

Setup takes a minute and is entirely on your side: Discord → Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook, copy the URL, paste it into your listing.

It's a notification, not a reward channel. Grant rewards from the signed callback, never from Discord.

A badge on your posts​

Owners of the top ten listings wear a badge on every post they make, anywhere on the forum. Nothing to set up — it follows the ranking.

Reward your players for voting​

This is the part server owners ask for most. Connect your game server to ours and every time somebody votes for you, we call your server — vote points, in-game currency, a crate, whatever fits your economy. You decide what the reward is; we just tell you the moment it's earned.

Every callback is a signed POST to your URL:

{
    "content_id": 51,
    "title": "Your Server",
    "data": {
        "user_id": 4,
        "username": "MentaL",
        "ref": "acct_88214",
        "period": "2026-08",
        "votes": 61,
        "source": "site",
        "time": 1787416627
    }
}

Verifying it takes six lines. The signature is HMAC-SHA256 over the timestamp, a dot, and the raw body:

$body      = file_get_contents('php://input');
$timestamp = $_SERVER['HTTP_RZ_TIMESTAMP'] ?? '';
$signature = $_SERVER['HTTP_RZ_SIGNATURE'] ?? '';

$expected = 'sha256=' . hash_hmac('sha256', $timestamp . '.' . $body, $yourSecret);

if (!hash_equals($expected, $signature)) { http_response_code(400); exit; }
// verified - grant the reward

Node.js and C# versions are in the docs, ready to paste.

Prove it works before your first vote​

Send test callback fires a fully signed callback at your endpoint with source set to test, runs it while you wait, and tells you the result on the page you're standing on — including the exact error if your endpoint is down. A delivery panel on the same page shows your last successful delivery.

The rewards guide is written for someone who has never wired two servers together. It opens with a two-minute webhook.site walkthrough so you can watch a real callback arrive before you write a line of code, then gives you the smallest receiver that works, then signatures and idempotency once you've seen it working.

Players without a forum account​

Put your own player reference on the vote link and we hand it straight back as data.ref. Your game already knows who's voting; we don't need to.

https://forum.ragezone.com/topsites/YOUR-ID/vote?ref=acct_88214

Missed a callback? Ask us​

Server down for a patch when someone voted? Query us directly with a listing key you generate yourself from your own listing page. No staff involved.

curl -H 'RZ-Listing-Key: YOUR_LISTING_KEY' \
  'https://forum.ragezone.com/topsites/YOUR-ID/vote-check?ref=acct_88214'

# {"content_id":51,"ref":"acct_88214","period":"2026-08","voted":true,...}

One reward per voter per month, enforced on our side. Withdrawing and re-voting never fires a second callback, and push plus pull together mean nobody's reward falls through the cracks.

You set all of this up yourself from your listing — Set up vote callback. No tickets, no waiting on staff.

If you integrated early: the legacy RZ-PostBack-Secret header is gone. It sent your shared secret in plaintext on every callback and only existed for receivers written against the very first version. Use the signature.

Voting from your launcher or in-game​

There's a vote endpoint your launcher or in-game browser can call directly, so your players vote without leaving your game:

curl -X POST \
  -H 'X-RaGEZONE-TopSites: 1' \
  -d 'ref=acct_88214' \
  'https://forum.ragezone.com/topsites/YOUR-ID/api-vote'

It's deliberately anonymous-friendly and deliberately fraud-resistant: the voter is the address the request comes from, rate limits apply, and no parameter exists that can forge a vote or claim someone else's identity. A ranking your players can trust is the whole product.

Finding servers​

Search​

Listings and reviews are in the board's search — the same box at the top of every page. Inside Top Sites you get a dropdown:

• Listings — everywhere in the directory
• This category — while you're browsing a game
• This listing — while you're on a listing, searches its reviews

There's also a Search listings tab on the full search page, with the category tree and a "search child categories as well" option. Reviews can be searched separately, so if you remember somebody mentioning "constant rollbacks", you can find that review instead of digging through the directory.

The launch calendar​

A server opening on Friday should be able to say so. Set an Opening date on your listing and:

• It appears on the launch calendar, grouped into today, this week, next week and later, with a "just opened" list underneath.
• Your card carries a countdown chip.
• You get a slot in the strip above the ranking on the directory front page.
• Everybody watching your listing is alerted the morning you open.

"Notify me" is simply watching the listing, so anyone already following you isn't asked to sign up for something else.

An upcoming server keeps its rank and votes — if you're building interest before launch, that shouldn't disappear because you haven't opened yet. The date is capped six months out and you can move it once. Moving it once is an ordinary delay; moving it every week is a way to stay at the top of the page permanently.

What we tell you​

Vote reset reminders​

Every vote expires on the 1st of the month. Everybody watching your listing now gets an alert in the first few days of the new period, naming your server and linking straight to the vote. Never you — you're the one person who can't act on "go and vote". Members who don't want the reminder can switch it off in their preferences.

If nobody has voted for you​

If your listing has never had a single vote, we send you one alert about it a day after you list, pointing you back at your listing where the vote link and the badge code are ready to copy. Once, never repeated, and never to a server that hasn't opened yet.

Most listings that sit at zero sit there because the owner never put their vote link anywhere — not in the launcher, not in Discord, not on their own site. That's a five-minute fix, and worth knowing about on day two rather than month three.

If your vote rewards stop being delivered​

If you've wired up the vote callback and your server starts refusing it, you get an alert — because the first thing that happens otherwise is your players voting and getting nothing, and you finding out from them.

We try four times for each vote: once, then again after 5, 10 and 20 minutes. If all four are refused, that vote's reward has been given up on, and that's when you're told. Once — not once per vote — and nothing further until a delivery succeeds, so a server that's down for a weekend doesn't bury your alerts.

The alert takes you to Manage listing → Rewards, where the exact error is waiting next to the Send test callback button, so you can fix it and prove it's fixed on the same screen.

Your statistics​

Statistics are a TopSites VIP feature. Manage listing → Stats shows:

• Clicks on your play link, day by day. Votes measure how organised your players are and reviews measure what people think of you; neither answers the question you'd actually ask a directory, which is whether it sent you anybody.
• Your votes, day by day, this month, today against yesterday.
• Where they came from — site, badge, launcher API.
• Your ratings, broken down.
• Where you finished every month you've been listed.
• Vote integrity signals — see below.

Clicks are counted once per visitor per listing per day, and never for you, because you're the one guaranteed to click your own link repeatedly and also the person reading the total. Your play link still points at your real address — nothing sits between a player and your server, so copy-link and middle-click work properly. The cost of that is that a visitor with JavaScript off isn't counted, so the number understates.

We call them clicks and never players. How many became players isn't something we can honestly claim to know.

Fair play​

What you can see about your own votes​

Five plain-language signals on your Stats tab, which is a VIP tab:

• how much of your traffic is guests — a launcher voting through the API is a guest, so a high share is normal if you've wired it up, and worth a look if you haven't
• whether votes arrived in bursts
• how many attempts were turned away against how many counted
• whether one source is behind an unusual number of them
• whether one client has been arriving from several addresses

These are counts only. We never show you who voted, what address anybody came from, or which accounts were refused — those are other people's players, and naming them would tell whoever's gaming your listing exactly what to change. Staff see the detail. A flag is a reason to look, not a verdict.

Vote rings​

One person, several accounts, one listing. The order this happens in is the whole design:

1. Detection alerts staff, and nobody else. Every signal has an innocent explanation — a household, a LAN, a phone behind carrier-grade NAT.
2. A moderator decides. Nothing is ever withdrawn automatically. A household shouldn't lose its votes to a heuristic.
3. Only then is anybody outside staff told.

If votes are withdrawn from your listing you get one sentence: some votes were removed as coming from linked accounts. No counts, no usernames, no addresses, nothing about what matched. That's deliberate — on a toplist, the person running the alts is usually the person whose listing gains from them, so the details would be an evasion manual. If somebody is framing you, you still learn that somebody is meddling, which is the part you can act on by telling us.

For a confirmed ring, staff can drop a listing out of the ranking for the rest of the month. It stays visible, playable, linked and reachable at its own URL. Only the position goes, because the position is the thing a ring steals. It expires at the reset on its own.

Nothing is ever said publicly about a suspicion — there is no "under review" badge and there never will be. That would tarnish an owner who turns out to have been framed, and would invite competitors to farm the accusation on purpose. A decision is a different thing: once a moderator has acted, the listing is named on the Vote integrity page with the date it returns — the title and the date and nothing else, no owner, no accounts, no evidence. It comes off the moment a decision is reversed.

What we publish​

The Vote integrity page carries four figures for the current month, board-wide: votes counted, servers voted for, attempts turned away, and votes withdrawn after review. That last one is the number that says the rules are enforced rather than just written down.

It also lists any listing currently out of the ranking, with the date it returns. As far as we can tell no other toplist publishes its enforcement at all, and it's the page to send anybody who asks whether the order here means anything.

What we don't publish is which signals the detector uses or where the lines are drawn. A server that opened last week has a wall of new-account voters because it opened last week — a new server and a cheating one look identical from the outside, and publishing the thresholds would hand the manual to whoever's gaming the board.

Reporting a listing or a review​

The report form asks a reason first: server offline, duplicate listing, misleading description, vote manipulation, stolen files, malware, wrong category — each with a line explaining what it covers. Reviews have their own list. Your reason reaches the moderator as the first line of the report, and if what you reported gets resolved, you're told.

Being found​

• Your reviews show up in Google. Listings with reviews carry review structured data, which is what puts the ★★★★☆ under your result. Your listing ranks with social proof attached.
• Every shared link unfurls properly. Each listing generates its own 1200×630 share image from your banner and logo, so pasting your link into Discord, Facebook or X expands it into a full card — even if your banner is a video, which normally gets you no image at all. Nothing to configure.
• Listings are in the sitemap. Every visible listing is in the forum's XML sitemap, generated and submitted on a schedule.
• Your game's page is written to be found. Each category page is titled for what people actually search — "MU Online Private Servers", not "MU Online" — and the bigger ones carry real writing about the game underneath the ranking. Somebody searching for a server for your game lands on a page with your listing on it.
• The launch calendar is machine-readable. Announced openings are published as structured data with their dates, and your game's page shows what's opening in it. If you set an opening date, that's another place you appear before you've launched.

TopSites VIP​

Everything above is free, forever. VIP is for owners who want their listing to work harder.

Working links​

Free listings don't carry hyperlinks. Whatever you write stays exactly as you wrote it, but the link itself is removed — the one way off a free listing is its Open link button, which is the address the directory vouches for. That's what stops the directory being worth spamming for the links alone.

VIP descriptions get real links back. A player reading about your server can click straight through to your Discord, your registration page or your guides, from anywhere in your own text rather than only from the one button at the top.

They're marked as member-written content, which is what they are and what any directory should mark links its members write. Nobody can promise you a search position and anybody who does is selling something — we don't sell search-engine credit and couldn't deliver it if we did. What VIP buys is a link that works.

Everything else VIP gets you​

• Your statistics — clicks, votes day by day, where they came from, your rating breakdown and every past month's result.
• Twelve gallery screenshots instead of four.
• The VIP look — the purple sweep and sheen on your card in every list, the gradient treatment across your listing page, and the TOPSITES VIP badge, so your listing reads as established at a glance.
• An exclusive forum icon, worn wherever you post, for as long as your VIP is running.
• Billed monthly. Cancel whenever you like from your account page; your listing stays exactly where it is. Renewing adds a month to whatever is left, so renewing early costs you nothing.

The VIP tab shows when it runs out as a date rather than a countdown, the date renewing would move it to, your payment history for that listing, and a real before/after of your own card — if you're already on VIP, the comparison shows the card without it, so you can see what you'd be giving up.

It still does not move you up a single place. Votes decide the order. Nothing else does, and that's stated on the VIP page itself — because a directory whose top spots were for sale would be worthless to advertise on.

Open your listing and hit GO VIP.

The docs​

Everything above is documented properly, with real payloads and copy-paste code in PHP, Node.js and C#:

• How the List Works — periods, resets, ranking, movement arrows, ratings, and what owners can see about vote integrity
• Getting Votes — where to put your link, badges, screenshots, trailers, Discord pings, and what not to do
• Reward Your Players for Voting — the full callback integration, including the test button. Start here.
• API — vote-check, voter lists, listing keys and scopes
• List Your Server — what a listing is, what it costs, and how to set one up. Send this to anybody asking.
• How Toplist Rankings Work — the three ways any list can be ordered, what each one hides, and how to read them

Get in​

The month resets on the 1st and every category is wide open. The first servers in are the first #1s — the badge is already waiting to say so, and your banner goes up in front of every visitor the moment you're listed.

→ Add your server · See what's opening

— MentaL