Help! Nobody can see my server!

So, your friends can't see the server you're hosting right? One possible explanation is that your ports aren't forwarded. To forward your ports follow these steps.

Windows

  1. Press start on your desktop.
    1. On the search bar type in cmd, it should eventually find cmd.exe. Open it.
    2. If on Windows XP or lower, click on run and type in cmd, then hit enter.
  2. On the window that opened, type in ipconfig and press enter.
  3. Scroll up through the text, and find some text called Default Gateway, the numbers next to it is your router ip.
  4. Copy your router ip.
  5. Open your web browser(Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Google Chrome, etc)
  6. Enter your router ip into your web browser.
  7. It will ask for a username and password.
    1. If you don't know your password follow these steps.
    2. Go to your router in real life.
    3. Find the manufacturer and model number of your router.
    4. Go on google and search for the default username and password for your router.
    5. Search through the results and try the username and password combinations they suggest.
    6. If you've literally tried over 6 different username/passwords, then someone in your household has changed the username/password to something else. So go ask them.
  8. You are now in the main page of your router, now click on some links until you get to a page that looks like similarly to this. (Note, this page will look different based on your router, look for keywords like port forward)
  9. You can now forward your ports, remember this image? See that other IP that starts with 192.168? Well any extra ip's listed in cmd.exe that starts with 192.168 that is not 192.168.1.1 is your local ip.
  10. Copy the last set of numbers from your local ip. So in this case it will be 102.
  11. Set the ip address to the last set of numbers to your local ip (So in this case it is 102). And forward ports 10666 to 10700 with the protocol set to UDP.
  12. Save it and you're done, now try hosting a server, make sure the port is between 10666 and 10700.
  13. Your friends should now be able to see your server.