The ranking
Plumbline
A plumbline is the oldest tool there is for finding true vertical. You cannot argue with one, because gravity does the work. That is the claim this ranking makes: the order of a list is not a matter of opinion, and it is not a matter of who wanted it most.
What it is built around
The shape of it
Players, not persistence
A listing rises because people found it here and went through to the server. Going through counts for a good deal more than glancing at a listing, and time spent sitting on the list counts for little by itself.
People, not traffic
One person tends to count once, however many times they come back and however many addresses they come back from. Activity that is not a person is worth close to nothing.
Steady over spiky
A fortnight of ordinary activity tends to be worth more than one enormous day. A listing that draws people most nights does better than one that made a lot of noise once.
Nothing stands still
A listing that stops drawing people drifts down without anybody deciding that it should, and there is no date on a calendar to aim at.
The same for every listing
Every listing on a list is judged by the same ranking as every other listing on it. It does not know who owns what.
Why it is not published
Plumbline is proprietary, and how it reaches an order is not published. A ranking that explains exactly how it arrives at a number has published the instructions for beating it, and the people most likely to read those instructions closely are the ones you would least want reading them.
Being straight about it
What no ranking can promise
Any list that says it is impossible to manipulate is overselling itself. Somebody determined enough, with enough patience and enough resources, can push on any ranking that has ever existed, and this one is not an exception to that.
What can be said is where the effort goes. Faking activity buys less here than the same effort spent running a server people want to be on, which is the arrangement the whole thing is built to produce.