How rankings work

Every ranking on minecraft.feedback comes from data we collect ourselves. Paid placements never change it.

Rankings

Most Players Online: Latest valid player count from our status checker. Servers whose last good reading is older than 15 minutes, or whose reading failed validation, are listed after ranked servers and aren't ranked.
Most Votes: Total votes ever cast for the server. Daily vote resets never remove past votes.
Popular This Month: Votes cast during the current calendar month in Eastern Time (America/New_York). Resets at midnight ET on the 1st.
Popular All Time: Number of different signed-in players who have ever voted for or favorited the server. Each person counts once.
Recently Added: When the listing was approved and published.
Recently Updated: The last meaningful edit to the listing's details by its owner or a moderator.
Alphabetical: Server name, A to Z.

There's no "Top Rated" ranking yet. It will only appear once a genuine rating system exists.

You can vote for each server once per daily window. You need an account to vote.
Windows reset at 3:00 PM Eastern Time (America/New_York) every day, for everyone, wherever you are. Daylight saving time is handled automatically.
The reset only affects eligibility. Past votes are never deleted, so monthly and all-time totals keep counting.
Monthly totals use calendar months in Eastern Time.
We use your account, your linked Minecraft identity (if any) and network-level signals together to stop duplicate voting.

We ping each approved server roughly every 5 minutes from our own infrastructure (Java Server List Ping, Bedrock RakNet ping).
A reading older than 15 minutes is shown as stale and isn't used for player rankings.
Impossible values (for example 2,147,483,647 players) are marked invalid and excluded. Moderators can also flag suspicious counts.
We never use a server's maximum capacity as its player count.