How this index works

NodeMesh Server Index is a read-only listing of publicly listed game servers. We do not run any of the servers shown here -- we only read the status each server's own public query port already answers to anyone who asks, the same information any player's game client uses to show a server browser.

re-checked about every 17 minnever more often than every 15 minat most 50 packets/s in total≥ 5 s between packets to one hostdelisted after 30 d of silence

What we probe, and how often

For each server we track, we periodically send a single small status-query packet (the game's own standard query protocol -- for the games this index currently covers, Valve's A2S_INFO protocol over UDP) to the address and port the server itself is already listening on. We read back only what that protocol already exposes: player count, map, version, and similar public fields. We never attempt to connect as a player, authenticate, or send anything beyond the standard query.

A server we've already discovered is re-checked roughly every 17 min (the median gap we measured over the last two days; never more often than every 15 minutes). A server that stops answering is retried with increasing delays (never faster than the normal cadence) and, after about 30 days of continuous silence, is removed from the index entirely.

Politeness

The whole crawl is rate-limited to at most 50 packets per second in total, and no single host is probed more than about once every 5 seconds even if it runs several tracked servers. This is a fixed limit in our code, not a setting anyone can raise without a reviewed change.

Identification

Our outbound HTTP requests (for the discovery step -- finding servers in the first place) carry a descriptive User-Agent naming NodeMesh and linking back to this page. The status-query protocol itself is UDP and has no header for a User-Agent or any equivalent, so a server operator cannot see "NodeMesh" in the query packets themselves the way they could in an HTTP access log -- this is a limitation of the query protocol, not a choice we made. We do not currently publish a stable source IP or reverse-DNS record for the probing host; if you need one to distinguish our traffic from anything else touching your query port, contact us via nodemesh.app and we'll provide it.

Your privacy, and where servers are placed

Each server's country is looked up from its IP address in the free DB-IP "IP to Country Lite" database (IP Geolocation by DB-IP, CC BY 4.0), refreshed monthly; it can be wrong for some addresses. When you open a game's list, we look up your own IP address in the same database, in memory, only to send you to your region's list (Europe, North America, ...). Your IP address is never stored, never written to a log and never put in a URL; the region pages themselves are the same for everyone, and "All regions" is always one click away. A browser can't measure latency to a game server, so "your region" is geography, not ping.

Opting out

If you run a server and don't want it listed or probed, use the form below with the same address and port your server is registered under (visible on its page here). Once excluded, we stop sending it any packets and remove it from every list and page immediately. There is currently no ownership check on this form -- we rely on it being used honestly, the same trust model as a robots.txt request. If a listing is removed maliciously by someone who does not own the server, contact us via nodemesh.app and we'll investigate.