Missing Dedicated Server Icon and Ping displaying as ???

[Intuitive]

Hello! I've started hosting a dedicated server recently by using the Vox Launcher and following Jazzy's Games video guide. Thanks to these two resources I've managed to get my first ever dedicated server up and running!

Unfortunately I've run into a few issues that I do not know how to fix. The first issue is that the server seems to not be marked as a dedicated server as it is missing the icon in addition to not showing up on the server list when using the "Dedicated" filter. The second issue is that the server's ping is being displayed as "???" and pushed towards the bottom of the server list. Here is an example of how the server looks in-game:

And here is what it looks like when filtered as a LAN server:

I have done some research in an attempt to figure out what may be going on, but I lack the technical knowledge to really understand what to do. I have read the Wiki's dedicated server guide, a post from this forum of a similar issue, as well as a Reddit post of someone experiencing something similar, but I fear that they have just left me confused.  I did try to do what was mentioned in the Reddit post's comments and change the server port to 10999 (is that what port forwarding is?), but when I did that it prevented the Caves shard from connecting at all.

I'm hoping that one of the lovely people here on the Dedicated Server Forums might be able to help me with these two issues. Thank you in advance for reading and any assistance you might be able to offer!

[Daniel86268]

The only thing that resulted in relatively high succes rates is to port forward your server.

Essentially you wanna tell your router that requests on the outside IP adress on port 10999 get forwarded to your Server's interal IP Adress on port 10999. (Replace 10999 with whatever port you wanna use.)

The DST server can somehow magically work without port forwarding active, probably over some steam networking or something, but with forwarding active, players can directly connect to the server, and the Klei Servers can ping your server to get the latency reading.

For some players configuring their firewall and/or disabling their Antivirus fixed it as well, but since it alredy works fine on LAN search (Where I believe your client pings the server directly) I'd assume you are missing the Port forwarding part.

I say relatively high success rate is because I've had it happen that for me at some point it randomly started showing the ???, and then a few months later, it just magically started showing the ping numbers. all while having the port forwarding correctly set up, and haven't changed anything. I've even seen official Klei servers suffering from the same issue. (At least Forge ones.)

[Intuitive]

I won't be able to work on this right away (my college classwork comes first!), but your explanation has helped me understand the issue better and what I should do next to resolve it. Thank you for your help Daniel86268!