Most gaming help lives in three bad places: a Reddit thread that’s archived before you find it, a Discord message that scrolled into the void, or a YouTube video where the fix is at 7:42 and you have to sit through an intro to get there. None of it is searchable six months later, which is exactly when the next person hits the same crash.
So I built LootQuery — a Q&A site for PC gaming problems, structured like Stack Overflow. One question, accepted answers, permanent URLs, tags. I’m a solo developer, so every decision had to keep the maintenance surface small. Here’s what I picked and why.
The stack
Next.js (App Router) + Prisma + PostgreSQL. Nothing exotic on purpose. The App Router lets me server-render question pages so they’re indexable the moment they’re posted — critical for a Q&A site where SEO is the growth channel. Prisma keeps the schema honest as it grows, and Postgres does everything I need without a second datastore for relational data.
Meilisearch for search. This was the one place I didn’t want to compromise. On a Q&A site, if search is bad, users bounce and post duplicates. Postgres full-text search got me 70% of the way, but typo-tolerance and instant-as-you-type ranking are where Meilisearch earns its keep. Indexing questions on write and querying it from an API route was a half-day of work, and the UX difference is night and day.
