How to List Your Game Server on JoinGG

You have a server running. It works, your friends play on it, and the population is exactly the same eight people it was three months ago. At some point the thought arrives: other people should be able to find this.

Getting listed is the obvious next step, and it is also the step most owners do badly — not because the form is hard, but because they treat it as paperwork. A listing is not paperwork. It is the only thing a stranger sees before deciding whether to spend an evening on your server, and most of the decisions that determine whether it works are made in the four minutes it takes to fill in.

This is what the submission involves, what happens in the seconds after you press the button, and the two situations where a listing waits for a person instead of going straight up.

Before you open the form

Two things need to be true before a listing can work at all, and neither of them is on the form.

The server has to answer queries from outside your network. Every server list on the internet, this one included, learns your player count by sending a small query packet to your address and reading the reply. If that query does not get through, the listing exists but shows offline forever, and nobody joins something marked dead.

This is worth testing before you submit rather than after. If you are hosting at home, the query port needs to be forwarded as well as the game port, and on most games they are not the same number. The port forwarding guide covers the specifics; the short version is that a server you can reach from your own machine tells you nothing, because your own machine is inside the network. Ask someone else to connect, or use a phone on mobile data.

The server has to be worth arriving at. This sounds like advice and it is actually arithmetic. A listing sends people to your server once. If they arrive and the map is empty, the rules are unclear and nobody speaks to them, they leave and the listing has spent its one chance. Getting the first ten minutes right is worth more than any amount of promotion, because promotion only controls how many people find out, retention controls whether that mattered.

If both of those are true, the form takes about four minutes.

What the form asks, and why

The submission at /servers/add asks for ten things. They fall into three groups, and knowing which group a field belongs to tells you how much care it deserves.

The technical fields

Game. Which title the server runs. This decides which query protocol is used against your address, so getting it wrong does not produce a mislabelled listing: it produces a listing that never comes online, because the wrong kind of question is being asked. Pick the exact entry, not the closest one: Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike: Source are different games with different protocols, and so are Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.

IP address or domain. Either works. A domain is better for a reason that has nothing to do with looks: when you change host, a domain follows you and an IP does not. Every player who bookmarked the raw address has to be told the new one, and the ones who do not read your announcement simply stop coming back. If you have not set one up, custom domains and SRV records is the whole procedure, and it costs about ten dollars a year.

Port. The port players connect on. If the game uses a separate query port, that is usually derived from this one automatically, but if your host has done something unusual, this is the field where it shows up as a permanently offline listing.

The fields that do the selling

Server name. This is the line in the results. It has to survive being read in a scroll of forty other servers, which means it should say what the server is rather than how good it is. [EU] Vanilla+ SMP · Whitelist · 18+ tells a reader four facts. ★彡 BEST SERVER EVER 彡★ tells them nothing except that the owner has taste you may not share. Naming a game server goes further into this, including why the brackets convention exists and when to break it.

Short description. One or two lines, shown under the name in listings. This is the highest-value text on the whole form because it is the only description most people will ever read. Say what makes this server different from the four above it. Not better — different.

Full description. The long version, on your listing page, read by people who have already clicked. Here you can explain the ruleset, the plugin list, the schedule, the moderation approach. Write it for someone deciding whether to commit, not for someone deciding whether to click; those are different readers with different questions. Writing a server description that earns the click breaks down both fields properly.

Tags. The words people filter by. Be accurate rather than comprehensive: tagging a vanilla server with modded gets you visitors who leave in ninety seconds, which is worse for you than not getting them.

The fields for humans

Discord invite, server website and contact email.

The Discord invite matters more than owners expect. A large share of people who look at a listing go to the Discord before they connect, because a Discord tells you in thirty seconds what a description takes five minutes to imply: how many people are here, whether staff talk to players, and whether the last message was today or in March. If your Discord is quiet, it is still better to link it than to hide it; a quiet Discord reads as a small server, and a missing one reads as an abandoned one. What belongs in Discord and what belongs in game is a longer question worth thinking about separately.

Contact email is not published. It exists so that a human can reach you if there is a problem with the listing, a query failing, a duplicate, a claim from someone else saying the server is theirs. Use one you read.

What happens after you submit

The site queries your address while you wait. If it answers, the listing is live before the page finishes loading — no queue, no email, nobody reading it.

That is not the same as publishing anything that arrives. The check is the server itself: a listing goes up because the address responded on its own protocol, which is a harder thing to fake than a form is to fill in. A directory that took submissions on trust would fill with dead addresses; this one cannot, because an address that does not answer never gets in on its own.

What that leaves for a person is the cases a query cannot settle, and there are two. They are further down.

Once it is live, three things start at once:

The status poller begins querying your address on a timer. From then on the player count, the map, the current player list where the game exposes one, and the response time are all measured directly rather than reported by you. You cannot inflate them and neither can anyone else. What a server list measures, and what it refuses to explains exactly what is read and what is deliberately not published.

Your listing page gets a URL that search engines can reach. It will not rank on day one: see getting a server listing found in Google for what is realistic and on what timescale — but it exists, and it accumulates.

Uptime history starts accruing. This is the figure that separates you from a server that was set up last weekend, and it is the one thing you cannot shortcut. Three months of unbroken uptime is a claim no new listing can make, and it is visible on your page whether or not anyone reads the number.

When a listing waits, and when it is refused

The address does not answer. By far the most common, and the one that costs you the wait. The listing is submitted from a machine inside the network where everything works, and from outside the query goes nowhere. It is not thrown away — it goes to a person, who will get to it — but you have turned a five-second listing into a queued one. Test from outside first.

The game cannot be queried at all. Some games expose no server protocol worth the name, and for those there is nothing to check, so every submission waits for a person regardless of how healthy the server is. Nothing you can do differently; it is the game, not you.

The address is already listed. This one is refused on the spot rather than queued, with a message saying so. Servers get submitted by players, not only owners, so a popular server is often already here. What you want then is not a second listing but to take ownership of the existing one, which is a different and shorter process: claiming a listing someone else added.

One thing that is not a reason any more: a thin description. Nobody reads it before it publishes. That makes it more your problem rather than less — a description made of superlatives gives a reader nothing to decide on, and there is no longer anybody to catch it for you. Say the region, the ruleset, the player cap, the schedule.

After it is live

The listing is not the finish line, and the first month is strange: traffic is low, the numbers move for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and it is very easy to conclude too early that it is not working. The first 30 days of a new listing sets out what normal looks like and the point at which quiet does mean something is wrong.

Two habits are worth starting immediately.

Keep the description current. A listing that describes a ruleset you changed in June is worse than a vague one, because the people it attracts are the wrong people and they find out after they arrive. Ten minutes every couple of months.

Watch the uptime, not the player count. Player counts swing with the season, the game's own updates and whatever else is happening that week. Uptime is the one number that is yours, and a gap in it is the single most common reason a growing server stops growing. Monitoring uptime covers doing this properly, but even glancing at your own stats page once a week catches most of it.

The rest is the actual work; being there, running the place well, and giving the people who arrive a reason to come back. The listing only ever promised to send them once.