Heste-Nettet: Building Denmark's Largest Horse Community
I built and hosted Heste-Nettet, one of Denmark's biggest online portals. Forum, marketplace, live video streaming with DRM, and a SAML2 identity provider. We won the FDIH E-handelsprisen.
Heste-Nettet was a social platform for horse enthusiasts in Denmark. Forum, marketplace, advertising, chat, gallery. At its peak it was one of the biggest Danish online portals, period. I built and hosted the entire thing through Cbox.
What we built
The platform covered everything a community needed: discussion forums, a marketplace for buying and selling horses and equipment, classified advertising, real-time chat, and photo galleries. Standard community features by today's standards, but this was the early 2000s. Each of these required custom development.
We won a cross-category prize at the FDIH E-handelsprisen, the Danish e-commerce award. That recognition was for the marketplace and commercial side of the platform.
Streaming before streaming was easy
I built a media streaming service with DRM-protected content. We live-streamed from Hest & Rytter in Herning to thousands of concurrent viewers. This was the ADSL and dial-up era. Streaming video to thousands of people when most of your audience was on 512 kbit connections was hard. Buffering, codec optimization, bandwidth management. Every kilobit mattered.
NetSafe: identity verification
The platform had a serious safety concern. With a large community that included young users, we needed robust identity verification. I built NetSafe, a SAML2 identity provider that validated users against the CPR registry (Danish civil registration), verified addresses, and required SMS validation. This was created specifically because of pedophile safety concerns on the platform. Identity verification wasn't optional.
An unexpected legacy
Years later, I discovered something remarkable: Heste-Nettet's forums are one of the named sources in the Danish Gigaword corpus, the billion-word dataset used for training Danish AI language models. Millions of forum posts about horses, riding, breeding, and equipment became training data for Danish NLP models. The community I hosted in the early 2000s is now embedded in the language understanding of Danish AI systems.
That isn't something I could have predicted when I was optimizing streaming codecs for dial-up connections.