How the Chatlista ranking works

Every listing on Chatlista has a score from 0 to 10. It is a weighted sum of six criteria, and the weights are public: activity 25 percent, moderation 20 percent, privacy 15 percent, usability 15 percent, user ratings 15 percent and ads 10 percent.

Activity comes from measurement where we can get it. Every few hours an automatic check visits each listing. For Discord servers and Telegram groups it also reads how many people are online, and the score uses the 30-day average together with uptime. Most chat websites do not publish an online count, so for them activity is judged from what the site shows when we open it.

Moderation, privacy, ads and usability are judged when we review a listing. We open the site on desktop and on mobile and note how you get in, whether there are rules and report or block tools, what the cookie banner asks, how intrusive the ads are and whether anything suspicious happens, such as redirects, forced downloads or requests for unnecessary personal or payment details. Each review lists what we saw, so you can check the score against it.

User ratings are your one-to-five star votes. An average appears once a listing has at least three votes, and it enters the score gradually, so a handful of votes cannot swing a ranking on their own. One person counts once per listing; voting again updates the earlier vote.

Status matters too. A listing that fails three checks in a row is marked unreachable, and one that stays unreachable is reviewed for closure. Closed sites stay in the index with their closing date, so a search for a well-known name still explains what happened, but they drop out of the rankings.

Money does not change the order. A listing can be marked as sponsored, and that label is always visible, but sponsorship is not an input to the score and never moves a listing up a list.