NRDLY - A Community for Nerd Culture

SecurityDog

NRDLY is a German-based community focused on topics like gaming, technology, movies & TV shows, comics, manga, and books.

🔗 https://nrdly.de

The platform is built around structured discussions, allowing topics to stay organized and accessible over time instead of getting lost.

Users can create their own threads, share knowledge, and engage in focused discussions across different areas of nerd culture.

I already created multiple addons for my flarum instance, like a API addon which collects data for gaming, comics etc. topics and shows them in the thread inside of the header.

Void1975

What theme are you using bro?

SecurityDog

Hi, I don't use a theme, I create almost all modules and the theme by myself.
Was looking for a good forum tool with great module function, thats why I use Flarum 🙂

foros

SecurityDog Good luck with your online community; the site looks really nice 👈

SecurityDog

Thank you, I try my best 🙂

Subarist

SecurityDog
Honestly, nrdly.de is one of the most impressive examples of a highly customized Flarum I've seen in the past two years.
The level of customization, from the overall design to the functionality, is so comprehensive that it's hard to even recognize it as a Flarum forum at first glance.
Really impressive work!

SecurityDog

Subarist
Thank you so much, that really means a lot! I put a lot of time and love into this project, so it's great to hear that it shows.

My only real worry right now is Flarum 2.0. I'm a bit afraid that a lot of things will break once it's released, but I'll test everything in a sandbox first before I switch the live instance.

Recently I also launched an RPG system where users can customize their profiles with banners, backgrounds and more. That was a really fun project to build, and I'll keep expanding it with seasonal items and similar stuff.

I'm really grateful that Flarum exists. I was looking for a modular platform that doesn't bring too much out of the box, where I can try out whatever I want and keep extending it over time. Flarum is exactly that for me.

ClaudiusH

I'm curious to learn how many features & customizations you built yourself and where you could build on existing community extensions? Particularly the library and events stuff.

Regarding 2.0: There's a bunch of tools available that should help you as a developer to get your code upgraded. Did you already start your upgrade work or what is holding you back right now?

Subarist

SecurityDog
You absolutely deserve all the kind words! And I’m sure the transition to Flarum 2.0 will go smoothly for you.

I’m actually a little obsessed with your nrdly-link-preview . I’ve been digging into how you handle video previews, and it’s given me quite a few ideas for my own project. 😍

SecurityDog

ClaudiusH
Pretty much everything you see on NRDLY is built from scratch, including the library and the events. I installed a few community extensions at the very beginning, but some of them have already been replaced by my own modules in the meantime. If I counted correctly, there are currently 29 custom modules running.

As for 2.0, I honestly haven't thought much about it yet. I'm still busy building things on the current version and having fun with it. Once 2.0 is out as a stable release, I'll take my time and look into it properly. I think I'll manage, but with a big version jump you always worry a bit that your own modules will need a lot of changes or stop working. We'll see. Good to know there are tools to help with the upgrade, I'll definitely check them out.

Subarist
Thanks, glad you like it! The reason behind the preview cards is mostly privacy. Here in Germany (and the EU in general) GDPR is a big deal, and if I embedded YouTube directly, visitor data would be sent to Google as soon as the page loads. With the preview cards my server fetches the video info itself, so no user data leaves the server unless someone actually clicks through to the video. For me that was the cleanest solution in terms of data protection.

Subarist

SecurityDog
GDPR isn't really an issue where I am, but I've been going back and forth on whether to use embedded iframes or just stick with plain links.
Embeds from Facebook, YouTube, X, etc. seem to be getting more and more annoying to deal with. It's also surprisingly hard to control the iframe layout or even keep the video at the aspect ratio I want.
My link preview already handles internal and external links in a similar way to yours, but I never thought about treating videos as part of the link preview too.
Seeing how you've done it gave me a really good idea. I think I'll explore this direction for my own project.
Thanks! 😄

Subarist

SecurityDog
Respect to https://nrdly.de, and thanks for sharing such a great implementation example.

I’m using a preview image with the embed URL set to youtube-nocookie.com. The actual YouTube iframe is only loaded after the user interacts with the preview. This means multiple videos can be displayed on the same page without loading multiple YouTube iframes or making requests to YouTube on initial page load.