Intlist — the community platform we built for ourselves

Intlist is our in-house community platform for a passionate gaming and entertainment audience. We built it because we wanted a forcing function — a real, running product that tested whether our stack and methodology could hold up under genuine user load, not just portfolio shots.

Off-the-shelf forum software couldn't handle the UX we wanted — nested user-generated content, pool-based contributions, claims workflows, community moderation, and deep Discord/Twitch integration. Building it custom meant every architectural choice had to be defensible under live traffic, not just in a mockup.

The bigger test: could it grow without a marketing budget? We invested everything in product quality and gave the community the tools to tell its own story. That meant automod had to be production-grade, the integrations had to feel native, and the whole thing had to survive press spikes without a 24/7 ops team.

We designed and built the full 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.

Intlist 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. All of 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 proof point that matters for clients: we don't just build sites, we run them. Every architectural decision we make for you has already been battle-tested on our own production traffic.