Channel listing criteria
search.jabber.network applies the following criteria when deciding whether to include a channel in the public listing. All criteria must be met:
- The group chat (MUC) must be set to be persistent, that is, to continue existing even if nobody is currently in it. Temporary rooms are often used for ad-hoc purposes and it does not make sense to list them publicly.
- The group chat must be set to allow public listing.
- The group chat must not have a password set.
- The group chat must be open to the general public, that is, the "Members only" option must not be set.
With the above criteria met, a group chat qualifies as a channel. To be listed, the following service-specific criteria must be met:
- The channel and the domain it is hosted on must not be on our service-maintained blocklist.
- The channel must have more than one occupant.
To even be able to consider a channel, it must be known to the service. Channels are discovered by the following means:
- when crawler@search.jabber.network receives an invitation to a channel, and
- by listing public channels on domains already known.
When inviting the service to your channel, note that it will not join the channel. Your channel will be considered at latest during the next crawl (see below for update frequencies).
Join / History actions
To get join/history actions on your channel, support by your MUC operator is needed. Please check the channel configuration options available to you, and if you do not find any related option, contact your operator. You may want to point your operator at the documentation for operators which contains more technical information on what is required.
Avatar criteria
Avatars are only shown if the channel is on a service-maintained allowlist. The allowlist is managed fully at the discretion of the service provider. There is no transparency whatsoever about list membership. The reason for that is the potential for abuse and the complexity of image processing and the load it may cause on the server.
If you want your channel to get on the list, please get in touch.
In addition to requiring a allowlist entry, avatars must also fulfill the following criteria:
- They must be PNG, JPEG or SVG images.
- Raster images (PNG or JPEG) must not exceed 1 MiB in size.
- Vector images (SVG) must not exceed 64 kiB in size.
- They must be published using the vcard-temp protocol (yeah... I know).
Tags
There is no official standard to add tags to channels, thus we invented an ad-hoc protocol which inevitably will be used forever.
We parse whitespace-separated hashtags from the end of the channel description (NOT the subject). Any such tag we find will be removed from the description itself and instead stored in the database as associated tag.
We only store tags which are in our allow list of tags, but all tags we find are removed from the description nontheless to provide a consistent and clear rendering.
Note that tags will not be searched by default, so if you want your room to be found by text contained in the tags, you should include the tags' names in the rest of the description, too. This behaviour may change in the future.
Channel delisting
Note that if your channel is listed here, it has been configured to be listed publicly (see above). The preferred way to remove your channel from the list would be to disable that configuration option (and wait for the crawler to pick up on it, see below for the update frequency).
If the crawler does not seem to pick up on your configuration change or you want your channel to be excluded from this listing only but want it included in other listings, please get in touch.
Channels which have been unreachable for more than two days will be delisted automatically.
Meta-information about channels
search.jabber.network collects the following meta-information about channels:
- Address (obviously)
- (Average) number of users
- Name
- Description
- Primary language
- Subject/topic (if available; currently not shown)
- Web chat and logs URLs (if available)
- Avatar (if allowlisted)
The name, description and primary language can be configured using the standard channel configuration options offered by your Jabber client.
Note: Not all clients offer (all) configuration options. In general, mobile clients offer fewer options than desktop clients. Gajim is an example of a desktop client which offers all channel options.
Note: The channel language option, albeit specified years ago, has only recently been added to servers. If the option is not offered to you while name and description are offered, please get in touch with your server operator. Point them at the documentation for service operators.
Note: Due to the complexity of handling avatars on the server side, your channel or domain needs to be allowlisted to be allowed to use avatars. The allowlisting happens at the discretion of the service provider. Please contact us to have your channel allowlisted for avatar use.
Update frequency
As there is no way for our service to be notified of changes to your channel metadata, updates can take a while. It may thus take a few hours for your update to be applied to the public listing.
You may or may not be able to speed up the update process by re-inviting the service (see above) to your channel.
Like all other channel stats, the number of occupants is queried in a dynamic interval depending on the load (unless search.jabber.network is joined in a channel). In addition, we perform a moving average on (up to, again, depending on the load) hourly samples. This helps to avoid having the listing fluctuate too much due to the usual in and out flux of occupants.
In any case, the number of occupants should at most be used as a rough hint to the popularity of the channel. It is used as the primary sorting criterium because we don’t have any better.