Every once in a while, I get a very positive e-mail from what I am guessing is a real, genuine human… a visitor of High Vibe It, a site that runs on the pligg platform. But most of action seems to come from spammers. In fact, I am guessing they must be using automated tools… otherwise, I fail to understand how the time it takes to submit a story is really worth the link — especially now that I am discarding them so quickly.

But pligg does something strange with discarded stories. It doesn’t really delete them. It removes the link from the main site, but the url is still accessible directly. For this reason, I wonder if pligg is especially attractive to spammers???

I have recently installed the “submit antispam addon” – and although it might be a pain to new legitimate users, it certainly is helping the spam problem at my site. And maybe after the spam is reduced, real users might return, or find the site more valuable.

This addon limits new users to one submission within a 24 hour period, and works on a kind of point system, where submissions have to get votes for the submitter to move up the trust scale. Seems like a nice idea.

I also tried to install some sort of patch that would validate the user’s e-mail upon registration, but that installation failed miserably, and I just don’t have time to wade through an endless maze of forum posts to figure out what the deal is.

Frankly, validating a user by email is a feature that I am surprised has been left out so far. Seems like a basic principle. So instead, what I see is mostly garbage emails addresses by the spammers who long ago figured this out.

On the plus side – I did just upgrade to the latest release, which went smoothly for the most part. But for any first time “upgraders”, be prepared to spend some time with it, and don’t expect any custom templates to hold up – even for a minor upgrade. Somehow, the idea of a template being a UI that is separate from the code base seems to be a work in progress with pligg too.

This whole post may come off a bit more negative than I intended. Truth is – Pligg is not yet out of beta, and is a very full featured and powerful system. I really like how well it performs and how much there is at work under the hood. It’s also pretty straightforward to tinker with, if you know PHP.

So that’s my Pligg rant & rave for the day.

02/07/2009 Update :
Pligg is working on what looks to be a really nice upgrade. I took the first Release Candidate for a spin, and it looks promising.