Building a Ranking Algorithm for 40,000+ (and growing) Discord Servers

The author built Discord Rankings, a directory that ranks 40,000+ Discord servers using a custom composite scoring algorithm incorporating member count, growth trajectory, activity levels, and content quality signals instead of just member count. The stack uses React on Netlify with Supabase for PostgreSQL queries and scheduled sync jobs that periodically pull data and recalculate rankings. Key challenges included building a categorisation pipeline to reduce 'Other' buckets and learning the hard way that React SPAs need proper rendering strategies for SEO.