README

A Flarum extension that adds powerful customisable homepage blocks: tracker information panels, dual statistics (internal database + external OpenTracker), advanced discussion filters, content-validation overrides, and a per-IP rate limiter.

Designed to plug cleanly into a tracker-style Flarum forum. Works hand in hand with the rest of the TryHackX extension family — tryhackx/flarum-topic-rating unlocks rating filters and sorts, tryhackx/flarum-magnet-link unlocks magnet click stats and sorts, fof/discussion-views unlocks view counters / view-based sort.

Note: Recent updates target the 2.x line only. The 1.x branch (Flarum 1.8+) is no longer actively developed — it stays available for legacy installs but won't receive new features.

Screenshots

Mobile view — discussion list rendered with different combinations of TryHackX extensions (thumbnails + ratings + views, thumbnails + views, thumbnails only, ratings only, views only, vanilla Flarum).

TryHackX Homepage Blocks admin panel — section toggles, theme mode, custom filter labels, tracker info / announce URLs, internal & external (OpenTracker) statistics, content title / length overrides and rate-limit settings.

Desktop discussion list with the full TryHackX stack — thumbnail sliders on the left, star ratings on the right, magnet button next to each topic.

Desktop discussion list — hover state showing the magnet tooltip loading inline (powered by tryhackx/flarum-magnet-link).

Support Development

If you find this extension useful, consider supporting its development:

• Monero (XMR): 45hvee4Jv7qeAm6SrBzXb9YVjb8DkHtFtFh7qkDMxS9zYX3NRi1dV27MtSdVC5X8T1YVoiG8XFiJkh4p9UncqWGxHi4tiwk
• Bitcoin (BTC): bc1qncavcek4kknpvykedxas8kxash9kdng990qed2
• Ethereum (ETH): 0xa3d38d5Cf202598dd782C611e9F43f342C967cF5

You can also find the donation option in the extension's admin settings panel.

Features

• Tracker info panel — display BitTorrent tracker announce URLs with copy-to-clipboard support, a custom heading and sub-heading.
• Dual statistics system — show internal forum stats (from the database) and external OpenTracker stats side by side:
  • Internal stats — torrents, users, magnets, downloads, views, average rating (pulled from the forum database).
  • External stats (OpenTracker) — seeds, leechers, peers, completed downloads, uptime, fetched directly from the OpenTracker XML endpoint (/stats?mode=everything). Leechers are derived as peers − seeds (OpenTracker's peers count is the whole swarm).
  • Shared cache + single-flight — the backend fetches the tracker at most once per cache lifetime, globally, and serves everyone from one shared cache; when a fetch is already running, other requests are never triggered and get the cached/stale value instead. Configurable cache lifetime, max fetch time (large trackers can take ~a minute to compute stats) and client refresh interval.
• Advanced discussion filters — filter bar for the discussion list with 7 filter types:
  • Title search
  • User search
  • Rating interval (requires tryhackx/flarum-topic-rating)
  • Date interval (Today, 1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 / 6 months, 1 year)
  • Category (tag) selection
  • Sort by — creation date (always available), plus a Steam-DB-style confidence rating, average rating, rating count and recently rated (with tryhackx/flarum-topic-rating), views (with fof/discussion-views), and magnet clicks total / top magnet / recently clicked (with tryhackx/flarum-magnet-link). Options whose extension isn't installed are hidden automatically.
  • Sort direction (ascending / descending)
• Content-validation overrides — override Flarum's built-in title and content length limits without patching core:
  • Title length: 1–200 characters (varchar(200) column max).
  • Content length: 0–16,000,000 characters (mediumtext column max).
  • Each toggle is independent.
• Rate limiting — a built-in per-IP points limiter on the search / filters action. Each visitor has a budget that refills over time; when it runs out the IP is temporarily blocked for a configurable duration and the visitor sees a friendly countdown. Client IPs are resolved from Flarum core (proxy-aware), so the limit can't be bypassed with a spoofed X-Forwarded-For header. The per-IP budget is kept on the local filesystem with per-IP locking — ideal for a single server; if you run several app servers behind a load balancer, front them with a shared store (Redis).
  • Enforced server-side. The authoritative charge is a middleware on core's GET /api/discussions that meters requests carrying the heavy filter[title] / filter[user] (LIKE %…%) parameters — so bots, scrapers and flooders hitting the API directly are throttled and blocked before the query touches the database, not just users of the on-page filter bar. The client-side pre-flight is kept purely for UX (instant countdown before a query fires); to avoid double-billing, a successful pre-flight grants a short-lived per-IP grace that the middleware consumes for the follow-up real request. Only heavy title/user searches are metered — ordinary browsing and short (<3-char) filters are never charged. (A shared cache such as Redis is still recommended if you run several app servers, so the per-IP bucket is consistent across nodes.)
• Collapsible sections — Section 1 (tracker + stats) can be collapsed by default to save space.
• Hide hero banner — optional toggle to hide Flarum's default hero banner.
• Tag filtering — show only tags that actually have discussions, optionally with discussion counts next to tag names.
• Polish & English locales — fully translated UI.

Requirements

• Flarum ^2.0.0-rc.1
• PHP ^8.3 (matches Flarum 2.x's own minimum)
• flarum/tags (required)

Recommended companions

These aren't strictly required but unlock additional functionality:

• fof/discussion-views — view count statistics and view-based sorting.
• tryhackx/flarum-topic-rating — rating-based filtering and sorting (Steam-DB-style, average rating, etc.).
• tryhackx/flarum-magnet-link — magnet click statistics (tracker stats block) and topic-scoped magnet-click sorts (clicks total / top magnet / recently clicked).

Installation

composer require tryhackx/flarum-homepage-blocks
php flarum cache:clear

Updating

composer update tryhackx/flarum-homepage-blocks
php flarum cache:clear

Configuration

1. Navigate to the Administration panel.
2. Find TryHackX Homepage Blocks in the extensions list and enable it.
3. Click the extension to access the configuration sections:

API endpoints

Links

• GitHub
• Packagist
• Report Issues

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.