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About Toopics

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Toopics is an independent directory of gaming Discord servers, sorted by the game you play and the kind of community you want. Every listing’s invite is checked through Discord’s own invite system before it appears and again every day, and the guides alongside the directory cover the practical side of Discord, esports and gaming setups.

The problem we are trying to fix

Finding a good Discord server for a specific game is harder than it should be. Invite links posted on Reddit or in YouTube descriptions expire. Server-list sites rank by bump count or paid placement, so the top result is whoever clicked a button most recently. Discord’s own discovery tab only surfaces large servers that meet its eligibility rules, which leaves out the 200-member clan that would actually be a good fit.

The result is a lot of dead links, bait servers padded with bots, and communities that have nothing to do with the game in the title.

Toopics takes the opposite approach: fewer listings, each one verified, each one tagged by what it is actually for.

Who runs Toopics

Joseph Smith, founder of Toopics

Toopics was started by Joseph Smith, a gamer born in the 90s who grew up on PlayStation platformers and Halo 2 multiplayer. He plays Counter-Strike and Dota 2 competitively, and while studying at the University of Lincoln he competes in National Student Esports with the Lincoln Dota team.

Joseph never had the hours to play at a professional level, so he built the site he wanted as a player: one place to find a Discord server for the game you actually play, and guides that cover the practical side. He writes the guides and reads every server submission himself.

The domain

Before Toopics, this domain was already about bringing people together. It started out as a place to share pictures of cities around the world, and later it showed the most popular Instagram posts, users and hashtags as they changed over time.

In Joseph’s words: “That inspired me. I want to bring the same level of social interaction to Discord gaming servers, which is why we went ahead and began using this retired domain again.”

How the directory is organized

Every server sits in two places at once.

By game. A listing for a Valorant server lives under Valorant. A server that covers several titles is tagged with each one it is genuinely built around.

By type. We use eight types, because the reason you join a server matters as much as the game:

  • LFG and matchmaking. Servers built around finding teammates: ranked queues, raid groups, co-op partners, regional matchmaking channels.
  • Competitive and esports. Competitive teams, amateur leagues, scrim-finding hubs and tournament organizers.
  • Creators and streamers. Communities run by streamers and YouTubers. Useful if you want to follow a specific person, less useful if you just want to find a match.
  • Community and chill. Social servers where the game is the shared interest but the point is hanging out, voice chat and the occasional casual session.
  • Official. Servers run by a game’s developer or publisher.
  • Modding. Communities that build and share mods, tools and custom content.
  • Roleplay. Servers organised around in-character play.
  • Trading. Servers for swapping in-game items within the game’s own rules.

A server can appear in more than one type if it genuinely does more than one thing. Most don’t, and we tag conservatively.

Each listing also shows the server’s primary language, its member count and how many members are online, both taken from Discord and refreshed every day, and whether Discord has verified the server. Those fields let you compare servers at a glance rather than read every description.

How a listing gets checked

Toopics does not join the servers it lists or read anything inside them. The checks use what Discord publishes for every invite link, plus a human read of each submission:

  1. The invite works and does not expire. Temporary links are the most common reason server listings go dead, so we only accept permanent ones. The invite is checked through Discord’s invite system before a listing goes live and again every day after that.
  2. The server matches its description. A reviewer compares what the owner wrote with the server name, description and member numbers Discord shows for the invite. If it claims to be an Apex Legends LFG hub, it needs to look like one.
  3. The numbers make sense. Member and online counts come straight from Discord. A server with thousands of members and almost nobody online is a red flag, and the counts on each listing let you judge that for yourself.
  4. Nothing we do not list. Submissions are screened for NSFW content, scams, cheats, account selling and gambling before a person reviews them.
  5. No adult servers. Servers built around adult content are not listed.

The daily check refreshes the counts and removes any listing whose invite has stopped working. We would rather have a shorter list than one you cannot trust. Because we never see inside a server, we cannot promise how active it is at any given moment, so join and read the recent messages before you settle in.

The guides

The directory solves “where do I go.” The guides solve “what do I do once I’m there,” plus a few adjacent problems gamers run into constantly.

Discord setup and bots. How to structure channels and roles for a gaming server, which bots actually earn their slot (and which just add noise), verification flows, permission mistakes that quietly break servers, and how to handle raids.

Esports. How amateur and semi-pro scenes work in specific games, how to find scrims, how tournament formats differ, and what it realistically takes to go from ranked grinder to a roster.

Pro settings. Sensitivity, crosshair, resolution and keybind choices used by competitive players, with the reasoning behind them. We care more about why a setting works than about copying a number from a tweet.

Gaming setups. Monitors, mice, keyboards, headsets, chairs and desks, evaluated on what they do for play rather than on marketing claims.

Streaming. OBS configuration, bitrate and encoder trade-offs, overlays, audio routing, and how to connect a stream to a Discord community without the community becoming an afterthought.

How we write

The house style is analytical. That means a few things in practice:

  • We give numbers where numbers exist: refresh rates, polling rates, bitrates, tick rates, member counts, response times.
  • We say when something is a matter of preference and when it is measurable. Mouse shape is preference. Input latency is measurable.
  • We compare options side by side instead of praising one in isolation.
  • We write for the person who is new to a topic and the person who has done it for years, which usually means explaining the “why” once, clearly, and then getting to the specifics.

We do not pad. If a question has a two-paragraph answer, it gets two paragraphs.

Independence

Toopics is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Discord Inc. in any way. “Discord” is their trademark; we are a third-party site that happens to be about communities hosted on their platform.

We are also not affiliated with Riot Games, Valve, Epic Games, Activision, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft or any other publisher or developer whose games appear in the directory. Game names are used to describe what servers are about, nothing more.

The site is new and independently run. Placement in the directory is not for sale. A server does not rank higher because someone paid for it, and we do not accept payment to skip the review process.

Submitting a server

If you run a gaming server and want it listed, you can submit it through the site. Please read the checks above first. The most common reasons a submission is declined are a temporary invite link, a description that does not match the server, and a server that breaks our listing guidelines.

Honest submissions for small, active servers are welcome. Member count is not a requirement.

What Toopics does not do

To keep expectations straight:

  • We do not host Discord servers or moderate them. Problems inside a server go to that server’s own team.
  • We do not guarantee that a community will stay the way it was when we reviewed it. Servers change. The daily invite check catches dead links, but it cannot see what happens inside a server.
  • We do not vouch for individuals in any server, including team recruiters or coaches. Use the same caution you would anywhere else online.

If a listing is wrong, dead, or misrepresenting itself, we want to hear about it. Reports are how the directory stays usable.