Here’s a quick Q/A style documentation to get you started.
How to search for channels in a specific language?
Add lang:xx to your search query, where xx must be substituted with the lower-case language code. For example, to search for english rooms, you would use lang:en.
Note that language codes are assigned by room owners and may use obscure variants or also contain mistakes. We do not do any normalisation in the search process, so the search may be inaccurate in such cases.
Why is my channel not listed?
We can only list channels we know about. We auto-discover channels on any domain
we know, but if you run your own domain, we might not know about it yet.
Invite
crawler@search.jabber.network
to your
channel. Note that it won’t join the channel, but merely add it to the queue for
scanning.
Also note that we do not list channels which exist in other chat networks,
such as Matrix or Telegram. This service is intended to list channels in the
Jabber network, not in third-party networks. (Though we might list gateways
for use from Jabber in the future.)
I invited the bot, but my channel is still not listed.
Re-try inviting. If it does not work after more than three hours, get in touch.
Why is my channel/domain not listed anymore?
Are other channels from the same domain listed? If yes, double-check the
listing criteria as detailed in the
documentation for owners.
If no other channels from the same domain are listed, it is possible that we
lost contact to the domain for more than seven days (re-trying every hour or
every six hours). In that case, we drop the domain off our database. You
might be able to get your channel listed again by inviting the bot as
normal.
If re-inviting does not work, please
get in touch.
Why is my channel’s avatar not shown?
Only avatars from channels on a allowlist are shown. The allowlist exists
to protect the service against abuse. To get on the allowlist, please get in touch.
My channel is on the allowlist, but the avatar is still not shown.
Please ensure that you are following the restrictions on avatars as
described in the documentation for channel
owners.
Avatars must be published via the vcard-temp protocol (yeah... I know).
If you think that your avatar fulfills these criteria, get in touch to hunt down the issue.
How to add tags to my channel?
Tags are parsed from the description. Make sure you are NOT adding them to the subject instead. They must be added to the description as a space-separated list of hashtags. Note that not every word is allowed as a tag: you can view the list of allowed tags.
To add tags to your room, you must add them to the end of the channel description. For example, a channel with the description “A #channel about philosophy and art. #art #philosophy” would be considered to have the tags “art” and “philosophy”, but not “channel”.
See also the Tags section in the documentation for channel owners for more details on tags.
Why do changes to my room description, avatar, name, and/or tags not show up in search?
Wait a bit. It takes time for changes to be picked up.
If your description and/or tags still do not change, make sure you edited the description and NOT the subject.