Alt-Fire

My ability to play games has waned over the years, but my desire never has. In my mind, I'm a gamer. I've become nostalgic for the original UP days. So this site will be an attempt to revive some of that old content and add some new content to help bring back that feeling you get with a well timed headshot right before the flag carrier reaches their home base. The plan is to bring over as much content as possible from Unreal Playground and The Gaming Asylum and give it a new, modern look.

Alt-Fire is a ground-up rebuild of a long-running Unreal Tournament community site, reimagined as a modern gaming hub. It pulls together four things that usually live on four separate sites: a searchable catalog of games backed by the IGDB API, a downloadable archive of custom UT99/2003/2004/3 maps carried over from the original site, gaming news aggregated from RSS sources and automatically matched to the games it mentions, and a community layer where players build collections, rate what they've played, and discuss it.

Members can link their Steam and Xbox accounts to sync their owned-game libraries directly into collections, filter the catalog down to just the platforms they own, and set a content-rating preference that applies everywhere — browse pages, search results, and game pages alike. Public profiles surface a member's favorites, ratings, collections, and activity feed, with an opt-out for anyone who'd rather keep it quiet.

The interesting engineering is mostly in the integration and migration work: a hand-rolled IGDB client with tiered field sets and cached OAuth tokens, a lazy-hydration strategy that persists games into a fully normalized local schema on first view (rather than pre-syncing a catalog of hundreds of thousands), and a suite of idempotent importers that pull users, maps, comments, and videos out of the legacy site's MySQL database — including a BBCode-to-Markdown converter for fifteen-year-old map descriptions.

Features:

• Game catalog - browse and filter by genre, popularity, and release window; global typeahead search hitting IGDB live; detail pages with screenshots, trailers, similar games, developers/publishers, and related news
• UT map archive - filter by game and game type (CTF, DM, ONS, WAR…), upload with prefix validation, S3-backed downloads with pre-signed URLs and deduplicated download counting
• News aggregation - RSS ingestion on a 30-minute schedule, automatic game matching, and a homepage feed that guarantees source diversity rather than letting one outlet dominate
• Collections - system collections (Currently Playing, Backlog, Completed, Favorites) plus custom ones, each individually public or private
• Ratings & comments - star ratings and threaded, votable comments across games, maps, and news articles
• Platform linking — Steam and Xbox account linking (full OAuth for Xbox), with queued library sync and per-platform playtime/achievement stats
• Content rating filter - a 0–3 preference mapped to ESRB ratings, enforced on queries, search, and detail pages, and applied to signed-out visitors too
• Profiles - bio, avatar, header image, geocoded location map, and an activity feed
• Auth & security - registration, email verification, password reset, and two-factor auth with recovery codes
• Moderation - community reporting with auto-hide thresholds, an admin moderation queue, and an audit log on every admin action