Building in public: forums, this blog, and self-healing buy links
Big infrastructure day: the community forums are live on-site, this dev blog exists now, and we shipped a system that finds and fixes dead buy links automatically.
Welcome to the Loadout Combat Lab dev blog. This is where I'll post what we're building, straight from the workshop.
What shipped today
Community Forums — The forums now live right here on the site (they used to bounce you to Discord). Categories for build help, part reviews, deals, and showing off your builds. Full-text search, editing, and real moderation tools behind the scenes.
This blog — A place to follow development. RSS is available at /blog/rss.xml if you want updates in your reader.
Self-healing buy links — We track over 561,000 parts, and retailer links rot. We built a system that checks links nightly, detects dead ones, and re-points them to a verified live product page at another tracked retailer — with strict validation so you never land on a homepage or the wrong product. Links it can't fix confidently get flagged for human review instead of guessed at.
Faster, smarter product pages — Every product page now has proper category landing pages (barrels, brands), cleaner URLs, and better structured data so search engines can actually find the parts you're looking for.
What's next
More price-history depth, more retailers, and the build-planner keeps getting smarter. If you hit anything weird, use the feedback button — I read all of it.