How to block your server's rooms from being indexed

Important notice ⚠️

MatrixRooms.info includes rooms to the search index, only if these conditions are met:

The room was configured as federatable when created
The room is set to "public" on room settings
The room is published on your server's public rooms directory
The server publishes the public rooms directory over federation

If those conditions are met, any rooms can be discovered and accessed over federation, whether by MatrixRooms.info or not. Please note that MatrixRooms.info indexes rooms purely by following and respecting the Matrix protocol, only making use of information on your public room directory which has been explicitly published by your homeserver. It will never index rooms otherwise.

How to stop publishing your rooms 🌐

There are several ways to prevent rooms from being indexed. You can choose any of those methods per your needs and preference.

Since the information to be used for indexing is publicly available and basically any other Matrix server can retrieve that information, it is expected protocol-wise to unpublish the room directory in order to prevent such information from being accessed altogether.

For Synapse servers, add the following config options to homeserver.yaml:

allow_public_rooms_over_federation: false

If you use etkecc/ansible and matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Ansible playbook to manage your Matrix homeserver, add the following to your vars.yml configuration file:

matrix_synapse_allow_public_rooms_over_federation: false

As enabling the option prevents your homeserver from publishing its public rooms directory over federation, no other Matrix server, including MatrixRooms.info, can access the directory, making it technically impossible to view/parse/index the public rooms as a matter of course.

Block specific rooms only 🏷️

If you do want to make your server publish the public rooms directory over the federation, only preventing rooms from being indexed by MatrixRooms.info, you can add special string which instruct MatrixRooms.info not to index them.

As a room administrator/moderator, you can add that string to the room topic to prevent indexing:

(MRS-noindex:true-MRS)

MatrixRooms.info will respect this tag and exclude the room from indexing.

Last resort: ask the maintainers 📩

If none of the methods above are open to you (say you don’t have the rights to edit the room topic), you can ask the maintainers of a specific instance to drop the room. For this one, reach us via the details on the About page.

We don’t recommend reaching for this first: it needs a human to step in, so every request takes far longer to handle than the self-serve options above.

MatrixRooms.info is one instance, not the whole project

MRS is open-source software, not a central service. Each instance decides what it indexes and how often it syncs, and the MRS team can’t remove a room from someone else’s instance. If a different MRS instance is showing your room, contact that instance’s operator directly.