I was working on a video game, and we had a few hundred player hosted servers. The default way that steam handles server listings is not super great, and there was quite a lot of metadata for each server I wanted to filter by.
I didn't know how to set up a centralized service to handle server discovery ourselves, so I had each server serialize, compress, and base64 its metadata and store it in some "rules" field in the Steam API. Problem was that the rules field was a list of indeterminate length of strings of indeterminate length. Absolutely no documentation, so I had to brute force it to find the limits. It was just barely enough.
So the client would fetch the full list of servers, filter on the few parameters steam natively supported, then they'd fetch the metadata for every remaining server.
Honestly I feel really bad about this one. It was a bad solution but it worked for years.
I didn't know how to set up a centralized service to handle server discovery ourselves, so I had each server serialize, compress, and base64 its metadata and store it in some "rules" field in the Steam API. Problem was that the rules field was a list of indeterminate length of strings of indeterminate length. Absolutely no documentation, so I had to brute force it to find the limits. It was just barely enough.
So the client would fetch the full list of servers, filter on the few parameters steam natively supported, then they'd fetch the metadata for every remaining server.
Honestly I feel really bad about this one. It was a bad solution but it worked for years.