How servers arrive
- Somebody adds it
Anyone can add a server by address. The listing is created immediately and put at the front of the scan queue, so the page fills in while you are still looking at it.
- A master-list seed
For games that publish one — Valve’s master server list, for example — we import candidates and query each of them ourselves. What the listing claims is replaced by what the server actually answers.
- A web seed
Public server lists are scraped, and every candidate is then queried directly. Again: the listing is a claim, the query is the fact.
- A port sweep
Game servers come in blocks — a box running one is usually running more on neighbouring ports, and we only ever heard about whichever got listed. A sweep probes ports around addresses we already hold.
It only ever visits addresses already in the database. There is no netblock field and deliberately no way to add one.
Adding your own
Use Add server from the Servers section. You need:
- the app it runs;
- the address — IPv4, IPv6, or a hostname;
- the game port, and the query port if it differs.
Everything else — name, map, population, country, category — is filled in by the first scan.
Get the query port right
The single most common reason a live server shows as dead is a wrong query port. It is often not the game port, and a hosting panel frequently hands out something unrelated. If you are unsure, add the server anyway and let the repair passes find it — they will, given a little time.
Claiming a listing
A listing the scanner found has no owner. Claiming it makes it yours.
What claiming gets you:
| Editorial control | Name, description, body, rules, media, links, tags, categories |
| A faster scan cadence | Claimed servers sit in faster tiers than unclaimed ones — and a supporter’s claimed server sits in the fastest scheduled lane there is |
| Query overrides | The ability to take individual measured fields over from the scanner |
| Integrations | The ability to authorise a plugin to report first-hand |
| The full item feature set | Followers, reviews, discussions, a roadmap, a changelog |
A claim also triggers a forced rescan — the listing goes straight to the front of the queue with a sentinel due-time, ahead of even the cold-start backlog, so verification does not wait behind two million addresses.
Hostname or IP
If your server lives behind a DNS name, set hostName and turn on
useHostName. The hostname then becomes what is presented everywhere: the
connect URL, the copy button, the general tab, the app API, the party hand-off
and the page slug.
The IP stays on the row because that is what the scanner dials, and what your hostname resolves to on each scan. This is a presentation choice, and the point of it is that moving hosts does not make every link and copied address on the site go stale.
Hiding your address
showNetInfo off blurs the address on the page and nulls it out of the API,
including for anonymous readers. The server is still listed, still queried and
still ranked; people just cannot copy its address off the page.