For most of this summer you could open dayzmetrics.com/map/q群40097000-pvp and get a working page. Filters down the side, a server count, a player total. Google had indexed it. No such map has ever existed for DayZ, because that string is not a map name. It is a phone number.
40097000 is a QQ group ID. QQ is a Chinese chat platform, and every group on it has a number the way a Discord server has an invite code. So a few hundred server owners took the field that is supposed to say "this server runs Chernarus" and used it to say "message us here".
The map field is a text box nobody checks
When a DayZ server is online it publishes a small block of text about itself to Valve's master server list: its name, its current and maximum player count, its ping, and a bag of loose tags. One of those tags is the map.
Every value in that block is typed by the server, not measured by anyone. No check that the map exists, no list of allowed values, no meaningful length limit. If a server says its map is "Normal", then as far as the entire internet is concerned, the map is Normal. Every browser you have used, the in-game one included, reads that same block and shows you whatever it finds.
Why a server would advertise a chat group
In most of the world you find a DayZ server by opening a browser, sorting by population, and clicking something. The Chinese scene does not work that way, and the reason is boring: the browser was never much use there.
Servers get found through QQ groups and voice platforms like YY and KooK. You join a group, and the address, the port, the password, the wipe schedule and the rules are all posted inside it. Players connect by typing the IP and port directly rather than searching a list. Look at any Chinese DayZ community post and it reads the same way: a group number, a voice channel number, and an address like 202.189.12.153:2302. The group is the community. The server is where the group happens to play.
That makes the Steam listing an advertisement rather than a destination. Nobody expects you to filter by Q群40097000-PVP. They expect you to read it and go find the group.
The name carries the pitch, the map field carries the group number, and neither has much to do with finding a server to play on.
They published a mod to carry the advert
The advertising is not limited to the fields a browser shows. All 1,921 of these listings run the same three mods: Community Framework and VPPAdminTools, both ordinary, and a third one called @YY40097, Workshop item 2934232176.
That mod is theirs. It carries the same YY channel number as the map string, and my own mod catalogue, which counts only servers that pass the checks for being real, records it on exactly one server. So a mod is published on the Steam Workshop, listed by 1,921 servers, and genuinely played on one.
Uploading a mod is worth the trouble because the mod list is a field like any other. It shows in the browser, it shows in the launcher, and it survives whatever filtering catches the name and the map.
What the listings are for
Bohemia's own feedback tracker has been carrying reports of this for years, and the pattern people describe is consistent: thousands of listings sharing one IP address on different ports, showing fabricated player counts, all leading back to a single real server. Server owners on the tracker report players being funnelled onward once they arrive, either into paying for queue priority or into a chat group, and in the worse cases into a Discord or website set up to impersonate someone else's community.
I can measure the listings and the mod. I cannot see what happens after someone joins, so treat the last part as what operators of legitimate servers report rather than something I have verified.
What I can say is that it is working well enough to be a problem for everyone else. Players outside China have spent years reporting that the community browser shows them almost nothing but these servers, that the launcher is slow or refuses to finish loading the list, and that finding a real server means connecting by IP or using a third-party launcher instead. Bohemia has acknowledged the issue and said the matter sits with its legal department. The listings are still there.
Twenty thousand storefronts, one shop
I assumed this many listings meant a lot of small operators. It does not. Every listing that has carried a QQ group in its map field since 24 May resolves to two group numbers, 40097000 and 40097127, sitting next to each other in Tencent's numbering.
The hosting is just as concentrated:
One address, 1,935 listings, one per port. Nothing is running behind them. A listing is a few hundred bytes of text a process publishes about itself, so a single box can publish thousands and never host a game. Three neighbouring addresses do the same at 1,604, 1,504 and 1,386 listings each.
The ten-thousandth fake listing costs the same as the first, which is why there is no reason for there to be few.
The population lie needs a second lie underneath it
Real servers come in every size, but they stop at 127 slots. Not one on the list claims more than that.
Farms claim up to 255, and more than a quarter of them claim exactly 255, the largest number the field will carry. So a listing showing 255 players is not claiming to be impossibly busy. It is claiming to be precisely full, on a capacity that was invented to make the population fit. All three servers above are sitting at exactly that.
What it does to the map counts
Once the map field is advertising space, filtering by map stops working. Right now 25,821 fake servers claim to be Livonia, whose internal name is enoch, against 967 real ones. The fakes claim 4,693,603 players between them. The real Livonia scene holds 2,659.
Namalsk has 22,497 fakes against 578 real. Chernarus has 20,778 against 6,477. Farms cluster on the maps people search for, because that is where the clicks are. A farm reporting q群40097000-pvp has given up on being found by map and is fishing for group members instead.
My own bug, which is the funnier half
While I was looking at the QQ page I found something worse on my side. Google had indexed a page of mine titled "DayZ Normal servers - 5 live with 0 players". Five servers, zero players, a map called Normal, my domain sitting next to it in search results.
That page existed because of a decision I still think was reasonable. I did not want a hardcoded list of maps. Custom maps arrive constantly in DayZ: Deer Isle, Sakhal, Namalsk, Banov. If I only generated pages for maps I already knew about, the day someone launched a good new one I would be the last browser to show it. So the rule was: see a new map string, build a page for it. Cheap, self-updating, and completely defenceless.
Other strings that earned themselves a page: "eternal" with 30 servers, "usa.mbd", and the empty string, which produced a tidy little page for the 31 servers reporting no map at all.
What I changed
Map pages now depend on how many real servers report a string, rather than on a list I keep by hand. Farms are excluded before the counting starts, so a string can have any number of listings behind it and still come out at nothing. Pripyat had 122 real servers when I checked. Deadfall had 96, Chernarus 2035 had 84, and the QQ advert had none. All three of those maps qualified while I was writing this, and I had not heard of any of them.
Everything below the line is still parsed and stored. Those servers appear in the main list and in search, and each one still shows the raw map string its owner typed. It just does not get a URL, so Google no longer gets invited to index a QQ advert with my name on it.
The group numbers are in the mod names too, so this will turn up somewhere else eventually. I will deal with it then.
If you spot a map page that should not exist, or a real community map missing one, every server page shows the raw map string it reports. Send me the string and I will sort it.
Measured on 24 August 2026 from dayzmetrics.com's own snapshots. Counts cover 83,986 servers reporting themselves online that day, of which 11,680 passed the checks used to separate real servers from population farms. Map counts come from the raw map field each server reports to the Steam master server list, before any correction. The QQ listing count is a snapshot: that string has carried anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand servers depending on the day.
