Intlist — a community platform built end-to-end

Intlist set out to build a community platform for a passionate gaming and entertainment audience. Off-the-shelf forum software couldn't handle the specific UX the team wanted — nested user-generated content, pool-based contributions, claims workflows, community moderation, and deep Discord/Twitch integration.

Building it custom on a small-team budget was the obvious constraint. The platform needed full auth, user profiles with reputation, a moderation queue that could scale, payments for premium features, spam/automod systems strong enough to not require a 24/7 ops team, and integrations with Discord and Twitch that felt native rather than bolted on.

It also had to grow without a marketing budget. The team was investing everything in product quality. That meant the tools needed to be *so* good that the community itself would carry the growth — across social media, into press coverage, into sustained engagement.

We designed and built the whole stack: Supabase for auth and Postgres, a typed Drizzle schema covering users, posts, comments, claims, pools, and leaderboards, and a custom moderation queue backed by HMAC-authenticated admin actions. Stripe handles payments; webhooks reconcile subscription state idempotently.

Automod was security-first from day one. Every user-submitted string goes through rate limiting, XSS sanitation, PII detection, slur filtering, and leet-speak normalization. A flag-and-review queue surfaces edge cases to human moderators, with audit logs recording every action. Ban enforcement lives in middleware so banned users never see logged-in pages.

Discord integration uses both incoming webhooks (post-to-Discord on notable events) and a full bot with slash commands and interaction handlers. Twitch integration detects live streams, validates clips, and embeds them contextually. Everything streams through Supabase Realtime so the UI stays fresh without aggressive polling.

The platform earned 20M+ social media impressions across community content, completely organic. Five major entertainment outlets — IGN, Kotaku, Game Rant, Popverse, and FandomWire — published stories about projects hosted on the platform, with zero PR outreach from our side. All the growth was earned by the community itself.

Ad spend, cumulatively: $0. Every impression, every visitor, every new registration came from product quality and community tools, not paid distribution. This is the kind of growth that compounds — and it only works when the product is good enough that people want to share it.

The platform is still running, still growing, and still operating with the same core stack we shipped. That's the long game we design for at Orbit: not a launch headline, but an asset that keeps working.