What is JoinGG? How this server list works

JoinGG is a list of player-run game servers. You browse it, you find somewhere with people on it, you copy the address and you join. That is the whole product, and most of the work behind it goes into one thing: making sure the numbers on a listing are true.

This page explains how it works — what is on the list, where the data comes from, how voting is protected, and what happens when money is involved. It is the page to read if you are deciding whether to trust anything else here.

What is actually on the list

JoinGG is weighted heavily towards community servers on older shooters. Counter-Strike 1.6 is by a wide margin the largest section, followed by CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source and Garry's Mod, with Left 4 Dead 2 and a long tail of Call of Duty, Battlefield, Quake and Unreal titles behind them.

That distribution is not a marketing decision, it is where self-hosted servers still exist. Games with a healthy community-server scene are games where somebody can rent a box, run their own rules and build a regular crowd — and that has always been the Half-Life and Source lineage more than anything modern. Modern titles appear where they have real self-hosted servers and not otherwise.

It is worth saying what that means in the negative, because a lot of server lists are vague about it: this is not primarily a Minecraft site, or a Rust site, or a FiveM site. Those games are on it, in small numbers. If you came looking for the biggest Minecraft list on the internet, this is not it.

Every number comes from the server itself

This is the part that matters and the part most lists do not do.

When a listing shows a player count, a map, a version or an online badge, that information was obtained by connecting to that server over its own status protocol and asking it. Minecraft servers answer a Server List Ping. Source and GoldSrc servers answer an A2S query. FiveM servers answer a plain HTTP request. SA-MP has its own. The code that does this speaks each protocol directly, with a hard timeout so a dead server cannot hold up a polling run.

Three consequences follow, and they are the reason the rule exists:

• Nothing is copied from another server list. Not the player count, not the map, not the name. If a number is on a listing, this site got it from the server.
• The server's own name wins. If an owner types one name into the form and the server broadcasts another, the broadcast one is what is real, and that is what shows.
• When a query fails, it says so. A handful of games have no public status protocol, or one that needs an authenticated session. Those listings report an honest reason instead of an invented player count.

That last point is the whole ethic in miniature. A server list that guesses is worse than useless, because it looks exactly like one that does not. The longer piece on which parts of a listing are measured and which are typed in by the owner goes through this field by field.

Voting

Every server can be voted for once per day. You do not need an account.

The vote is protected by two things. First, a signed challenge issued by the server, so a script cannot post straight at the vote endpoint without going through the page. Second, a small proof-of-work the browser has to solve — invisible if you are a person voting once, expensive if you are trying to farm thousands.

What is stored is a SHA-256 hash of the voter's address plus a salt, never the address itself, with a uniqueness constraint on server, hash and day. That is what enforces one vote per server per day.

None of this makes vote fraud impossible. Nothing anonymous does. It makes it cost something, which is the realistic goal. How voting works covers the mechanism in more detail.

What money buys, and what it does not

Two things are sold, and they behave differently. It is worth being blunt about the second one.

VIP and featured placement puts a listing in its own row above the rankings, with a badge on it. It does not touch the ranked results underneath, and it cannot remove or downrank anybody else.

Vote packs add votes to a server's vote total — the same total daily community votes go into, and the same total the rankings are ordered on. So buying a pack does move a listing up. There is no way to describe that as decoration and it is not described that way on the advertise page either.

The paid portion is recorded separately in the database from earned votes, which is what makes a refund or an audit possible, but the number shown on a card is the two added together. A high vote count therefore means somebody is trying — by voting or by paying — and it is a reason to look closer rather than a verdict. Read it the way you would read a review count, not a review score.

Listing a server

Listing is free. You submit the address, the game and a short description at add a server, and it is reviewed by hand before it goes live.

Two things owners tend not to know exist:

• You can claim a listing you did not create. Plenty of servers are listed by players. If one of them is yours, you can claim it and submit evidence of ownership for review, after which the listing is yours to edit.
• There is an embeddable live banner. Every server page has a banner at its own URL that redraws itself with current status, players and votes, sized for a forum signature or a website sidebar. It links back to the server's page, which is where votes happen.

If your listing is live and nobody is joining it, the problem is usually not the list — the common causes are worth reading before buying anything.

What JoinGG is not

It does not host servers, sell hosting, or take a cut of anyone's donations. It does not rank servers by an opaque quality score. It does not have a Discord, and support is not handled by email: everything goes through the form at contact, which routes by topic — a listing problem, an ownership claim, billing, a correction or takedown, or writing for the blog.

Corrections are genuinely welcome. If a listing on this site shows something wrong, that is a bug in the thing the site is for.