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Expected Server Downtime

The Pligg.com server will experience a brief downtime sometime between the hours of 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. EST sometime over the next few days. We are performing a simple hardware upgrade that should only take a few minutes to complete and reboot. I tried to schedule the downtime for when the site seems to receive the least daily traffic, so it shouldn’t be too painful.

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pligg: Pligg Blog

Pligg Featured Advertisers

A few days ago I updated OpenX, the script that we use on Pligg.com to manage advertisements. Formerly (last week) it was known as OpenAds, and a less than a year ago it was known as phpAdsNew. Today after checking the stats to make sure that everything was tracking correctly I decided to crunch some quick numbers to figure out how much the featured sites are paying per click on average. Based on the last three days of statistics, it turns out that monthly advertisers are paying about 0.095 cents per click, and half year advertisers are paying around 0.069 cents per click. I bring up these statistics because we’d love to earn some more advertisers. Our rates currently are $2.20/day for 6 month advertisers and $3/day for 1 month advertisers. Each advertiser receives an account to check their stats online along with weekly emails that include daily details for each days statistics.

Learn more about becoming a Featured Pligg Site here.

pligg: Pligg Blog

The Joke’s on Dreamhost

After yesterdays Dreamhost fiasco and previous issues with the company, I have decided to pull all current advertising for Dreamhost web hosting from Pligg.com. Even though Dreamhost has supported Pligg by adding us to their one-click install lineup, we can no longer recommend them as an entry level host because of their service record. The line was crossed not when they billed me prematurely for two years of service, but rather when they issued an apology email and blog post which felt unapologetic and insincere. Techcrunch.com illustrated this point the best in their post “Dreamhost Overbills Customers $7.5 Million; Uses Homer Simpson to Deliver Apology“. I had previously been a fan of Dreamhost over the years because of their swift support and excellent web panel features, but this incident was the last straw. Dreamhost has lost our endorsement, so currently we only support Midphase and ANhosting who we have yet to hear any complaints about.

pligg: Pligg Blog

Free Tools Pligg Developers Couldn’t Live Without

IRC Software
Colloquy (Mac and iPhone) / Trillian (Windows) / Konversation (Linux)
Communication is key when you work with a team spread across the globe. None of the Pligg developers have had a chance to meet in person, so it’s even more important that we have a tool that allows you to communicate with the group whenever we need to. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is “used by millions of people, and thousands of organizations, to communicate, share, play and work with each other on IRC networks around the world. Serving the Internet community for over a decade, mIRC has evolved into a powerful, reliable and fun piece of technology” (mirc.com). We have used IRC since we started Pligg two years ago to communicate with the developers and Pligg users, and operate a room (#pligg) on freenode.net’s server. You can join the room without any software by logging in to our java web-based room.


FTP Software
Filezilla (Stand Alone) and Fireftp (Firefox Plugin)
Everyone needs a way to publish files to their web server, and my way is always the free way. Filezilla is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh platforms and is a stand alone client. Fireftp is a Mozilla Firefox plugin that operates within Firefox.


Browser Testing
Browsershots.org (Web) and MultipleIE (Windows)
Most designers without a lot of test computers have used Browsershots at one point or another to double check that their work is coming out the same on most browsers. “Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server.”


One problem that most web designers have is testing on multiple browsers. Not only do you have to design for the latest browser versions for Internet Explorer, but you have to accommodate the several previous versions of IE that are less friendly to deal with. Unfortunately the world isn’t perfect and a lot of systems are still running IE6 and below, to help test for these older versions of Internet Explorer I use MultipleIE. This software lets me run Internet Explorer 7 all the way back to Internet Explorer 3.0 all on the same operating system. For some reason I never heard of this software until recently, so I’m a bit hesitant to suggest it even though it has been an essential tool that I use almost daily.


Miscellaneous
HelpDesk Software Hesk (Web)
We use this software over at the Pligg Pro Helpdesk, where we support our shop products. The software gives you an easy way for users to submit support tickets and category administrators will receive email alerts whenever there’s a reply. It’s well organized, easy to install and simple to maintain. Most importantly, it helps us streamline our support system to let us fix problems faster.


Winmerge
The ultimate tool for those who customize Pligg in any way. Winmerge compares files and directories and helps organize the data so that you can merge two documents together in sections or as a whole. One recent example of how I use Winmerge is when I needed to update my Pligg 9.8.5 templates to the latest format for Pligg 9.9. What would normally take me a couple days took me only a few hours.


Notepad ++
Not everyone uses Dreamweaver for designing sites. If you are fluent enough that you can write without the assistance of a program like Dreamweaver, you might want to try out Notepad ++. It organizes data well and is a great replacement for the standard windows notepad. I find it to be a cleaner interface with fewer distractions.

pligg: Pligg Blog

2007 Pligg Stats Roundup

I’ve seen a lot of other sites listing their top posts of the year, and it inspired me to share some interesting details about visitors to Pligg.com. We aren’t able to give an accurate number for traffic before mid June when we switched to using analytics on the entire site, so here are some stats collected since July 1, 2007 (5 months ago).

  • The average visitor has stayed for 4 minutes and 41 seconds.
  • The top 3 languages are English, Chinese, and German.
  • The top 5 countires are the United States, China, United Kingdom, Canada and India.
  • Top top browsers are Firefox (61.80%) and Internet Explorer (28.83%). Opera and Safari fall way behind at third and forth place at 3.96% and 3.78%.
  • 84.69% of visitors use a Windows machine, 9.77% are Macintosh and 5.18% are Linux. A sad 0.02% are iPhones and below that are Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 consoles.

pligg: Pligg Blog

New Pligg Beta 9.9.0

Happy 2008 everyone! It’s a new year, and what better way to kick it off by releasing the long awaited Pigg Beta 9.9.0
I’ll leave the technical stuff to the change log but I’m sure you will agree this is the best version of Pligg yet. Besides a slew of core improvements and a multitude of bug fixes, the first thing you will notice is a slight change to the installation process. We are rolling out a language fetching feature to the installation process. This will allow you to select a language, then the installer will connect to the Pligg servers to download the most up to date language pack.

Another new addition is Template Management. This will allow you to download and install templates instantly. You can also repackage templates for distribution much easier.

Some other great features included in this version are the addition of the Akismet anti-spam, and new Captcha module for registrations which allows for different types of Captcha methods to be used. Agree-to-Terms allows you to set up a user agreement upon registration.

We would like to thank everyone that made 2007 a great year for Pligg and we promise that 2008 will be the best year yet!

pligg: Pligg Blog

Seasons Greetings Pliggers!

It's been 2 years since inception of Pligg and we wanted to bring everyone up to speed on where we've been and where we're going. When Pligg began back on December 17, 2005 we never imagined how successful or complex the project would become. Pligg is now one of the most popular content management systems available today due to YOU, our wonderful users. Many articles have been written about Pligg, and Pligg has been mentioned (and even used) on many popular tech sites all over the web. The Pligg community forums have grown to over 17,000 members, all sharing ideas and supporting each other. Pligg is now offered by many web hosting companies as a packaged service. DreamHost is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world now offers Pligg through their "One Click Installs"

Many people have requested to have custom modules developed. We wanted to provide a place in which everyone could have the opportunity to have access to these add-ons while still providing benefits to the authors. Thus the birth of the Pligg marketplace aptly named "Pligg Pro". Pligg Pro allows you to purchase themes and additional modules to enhance your Pligg site even further. We launched "Pligg Pro" in the last week of October and has been an overwhelming success. It has allowed for Pligg to create a new revenue stream and has boosted development as we gear up to come out of beta and release Pligg V1.0.

To celebrate Pligg's second birthday we're offering a coupon code for Pligg Pro that gives you 22% off all orders until 12/24/2007. Use coupon code 'Birthday2' when making your purchase. Visit http://pligg.com/pro/ soon before the coupon expires.

Since our last release of Pligg Beta 9.8.2 we've been hard at work with bug fixes and code enhancements which will provide a noticeable difference in load times and code compliance. We're quite sure you'll be impressed, as this will clearly be the best version of Pligg yet. The next release, Beta 9.9.0, will be one of the last 'beta' releases before version 1.0. We've developed many new free modules that have expanded the abilities of Pligg. Anti-Spam modules that help reduce spam submissions and spam comments. A CAPTCHA module will allow you to choose from different CAPTCHAs or even use none at all. There is a new Template Manager module that allows templates to be installed with the click of a button instead of downloading, unzipping and uploading each file.

Soon we will be launching a new service called "Fraxi" which will allow anyone to create their own free Pligg powered niche community with just a few clicks of a mouse button. For example if someone living in Miami wanted to create a social network for the citizens of their community, they will be able to create Miami.Fraxi.com in a matter of seconds. No hosting fees, no installation process and no time wasted. They can then concentrate on growing their social network instead of needing to learn the ropes of FTPing, monkeying with server configurations, setting up domains, etc. More information about this service and website will be unveiled soon.

Future releases of Pligg will have a new installation process that will allow you to choose from various language packages. It will automatically download to your server the latest lang.conf file for the selected language. We're asking for help from bilingual Pliggers to help translate these language files in the near future. We've developed an online system to try to make the process easier. You can participate as a translator by signing up soon via the Pligg forum. More details will be posted on both the blog and forum in the coming weeks.

Since Pligg has grown rapidly we've needed to expand our server capacity a few times over the past 2 years to keep up with demand. Pligg.com receives roughly 5 million unique visitors and 20 to 30 million page views each year. This amount of traffic requires a massive amount of bandwidth and operating expenses. This is paid for by your kind donations and though sponsorships on the front page. If you would like to sponsor Pligg and have your company's link and logo on the front page, we offer several extremely cost effective plans. So please show your support by becoming a Pligg sponsor today. You can find out more about Pligg Sponsorships by visiting here. If you'd like to make a donation you can do so by visiting here.

We'd take a moment to applaud a site that has used Pligg in an original way. This time we tip our hats to the founders of www.RealEstateVoices.com, who have created a site with a unique look and feel that many visitors would not recognize as a typical Pligg site. Like many successful Pligg sites, they found a niche market and appealed to them through clean design and relevant content.

Thanks for a great 2 years! 2008 will be even better.

The Pligg Development Team

pligg: Pligg Blog

GoDaddy Discount Promo Codes

In need of a new domain or web hosting account? GoDaddy has provided Pligg with a few coupon codes to save Pliggers money next time they make a purchase on GoDaddy.com. This will actually benefit me personally because I buy domains like a kid at a candy store. Make sure that the next time you make a GoDaddy purchase you apply one of these codes to save some money. And sorry, but you can't stack these coupons.

 

Promo Code: PLIGG1
Additional 20% Off 1, 2, or 3 Year Web Hosting Plans

 

Promo Code: PLIGG2
$6.95 .COM Domain Names

 

Promo Code: PLIGG3
10% Off Entire Order

pligg: Pligg Blog

The (Old) Wiki is Dead to Me

Even after spending a considerable amount of time yesterday cleaning up spam links and even adding some additional content to the Pligg Wiki I have decided to pull the plug on it. Today I signed on and saw that there was a significant amount of spam added since my visit a day earlier. We have been looking for software to replace the wiki for a while now, but there doesn't seem to be a nice package offered for vBulletin users. The MediaWiki platform has not only a horrible interface, few customizable options, and a generic template thats difficult to change, but it has basically no spam protection. The wiki's contents will be copied prior to taking it down so that we could post it elsewhere when we find a better system. It looks that it might be a while before we find a better method for posting this type of content, but I'm too frustrated with removing huge amounts of spam daily to allow this to continue. The wiki will probably be taken down in about a week, so this post is just a heads up and a place for you to voice your opinion if you are against this decision.

If you know of an alternative to MediaWiki that preferably integrates with vBulletin and offers a decent administrative panel please let me know in the comments section of this article.

*UPDATE* Please see the article "Pligg Wiki 2.0" to learn about the new Pligg Wiki.

pligg: Pligg Blog

Pligg Wiki 2.0

Last week we shut down the old Pligg Wiki because of a large amount of spam that the moderators were not able to keep up with. To make up for the short Wiki downtime we are announcing the brand new Pligg Wiki 2.0. The new wiki system integrates with vBulletin, allowing registered forum members to edit wiki articles and even post comments. The new wiki operates much like a normal forum, so it is easy to create new Wiki pages and browse and edit the existing pages. I have already added several pages from our old forum to the new wiki and some of those articles appear with a "Reserved for future use" message at the top. I plan to include video tutorials in this area for many of the articles.

One of the great features of the new wiki is that you are able to create a "book". This lets you link wiki articles together like chapters in a book, allowing wiki readers to read articles in order. This is great when several wiki articles share the same category and should be read in a linear fashion.

Now that we have a brand new wiki, please do me a favor and help us out by contributing. All you need is a Pligg Forum account.

pligg: Pligg Blog

Additional Pligg.com Sale Details

I wanted to fill everyone in on what's going on behind the scenes at Pligg.com because a lot of readers and Pligg users have been concerned about where Pligg might be headed. What most of you have been asking me are two things, the first being "why are you trying to sell Pligg"? The simplest answer I can give is that Pligg has been very difficult to manage with such a small team with a limited amount of time available to maintain the project. Not only does it take a lot of time to squash bugs and develop new features for the code, but keeping up with the forum takes a lot of time too. We also feel that at this point we have outgrown the foundation that we started with over a year and a half ago. I would like to completely redo the site and staff a full time developer, but we are not fortunate to do that at this point. I think that by selling the site we are able to hand over the project to someone better equipped to handle these things.  Seeing that Pligg is one of the most popular content management system's out there today, I have no doubt that it will have a bright future with whomever takes it over. We have been in talks with a few investors, but I'm waiting another month to make sure that all investors have had an opportunity to pitch their idea and get a bid in. From what I've discussed with the current bidders, Pligg will greatly benefit from new ownership.

Possibly the question I've received the most during this sale price is "does the sale include the Pligg code"? A lot of people have approached us interested in buying the code along with the site, and many bloggers have written assuming that we were trying to include the code in the sale.  Pligg is open source and will remain open source, however if a buyer were to invest enough money we would be willing to consider writing fresh code as originally intended for Pligg 2.0.  This new code would be handed to the buyer so that they would have the option to license it however they want, open source or not.  Giving our lead developer a chance to write Pligg code full-time is one of the goals I have for selling Pligg.com. His knowledge and familiarity with Pligg would make him a valuable asset to the buyer and this would give him an opportunity to write better code, resulting a better content management system. I believe that most buyers are wanting to keep the code open source no matter what because of the many benefits of having a larger audience that open source brings.

If anyone has any questions about the Pligg sale, please contact Yankidank by way of a Pligg Forum PM. I would be glad to answer any questions from potential buyers, and even fill in bloggers with more details about the sale or Pligg in general.

pligg: Pligg Blog

The Wiki is Dead to Me

Even after spending a considerable amount of time yesterday cleaning up spam links and even adding some additional content to the Pligg Wiki I have decided to pull the plug on it. Today I signed on and saw that there was a significant amount of spam added since my visit a day earlier. We have been looking for software to replace the wiki for a while now, but there doesn't seem to be a nice package offered for vBulletin users. The MediaWiki platform has not only a horrible interface, few customizable options, and a generic template thats difficult to change, but it has basically no spam protection. The wiki's contents will be copied prior to taking it down so that we could post it elsewhere when we find a better system. It looks that it might be a while before we find a better method for posting this type of content, but I'm too frustrated with removing huge amounts of spam daily to allow this to continue. The wiki will probably be taken down in about a week, so this post is just a heads up and a place for you to voice your opinion if you are against this decision.

If you know of an alternative to MediaWiki that preferably integrates with vBulletin and offers a decent administrative panel please let me know in the comments section of this article.

pligg: Pligg Blog

Pligg.com Goes Fraxi

Pligg.com and Pligg.com/blog now both using the new "Fraxi" template, thanks to the work done by the folks at Moonrank USA. The design was created by me in Photoshop and ported as a Pligg template by Moonrank. The Pligg template version still hasn't been applied to the site because we are working on some new features release along side the new template. For now you have a beautiful new homepage and blog to look at and help us test out.

Want to help Pligg become a better CMS? Take a few minutes to answer this survey. We want your input on how we might improve Pligg and what we can do to better serve you.  The survey data gathered will be used to improve both the Pligg CMS and Pligg website.

pligg: Pligg Blog

Pligg Summer 2007 Survey Results

Last week I asked Pligg users to fill out a survey to help me gauge how well we are doing at giving our users what they want. So far 74 users have replied with their answers and the results will be very helpful in helping the developers choose what should be next on the development list and how pligg.com will evolve. Now lets get on to the fun part, the survey results. Remember that just because we are publishing some of the results today doesn't mean that you can't take the survey and make your opinion heard. I will continue to leave the survey open for the next 2 weeks to get as much input as possible. If you haven't already taken the survey, please take a minute to do so.

Which version of Pligg are you currently using?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Recent SVN  14.9%   11 
 Beta 9.5+  59.5%   44 
 Beta 9  20.3%   15 
 Beta 8  2.7%   2 
 Beta 7 or earlier  2.7%   2 

answered question   74 

skipped question   0 

How long have you been using Pligg?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Under 1 Month  25.7%   19 
 1-3 Months  27.0%   20 
 3-6 Months  25.7%   19 
 6 Months or more  21.6%   16 

answered question   74 

skipped question   0 
What do you use Pligg for? Check all that apply.
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Personal use  27.8%   20 
 Professional use  33.3%   24 
 Blogging platform  13.9%   10 
 User submitted news  70.8%   51 
 User submitted media (audio/video)  30.6%   22 
 Content aggregation (combining links from other sites)  34.7%   25 
 Social Bookmarking (Del.icio.us style web bookmarking)  19.4%   14 
 Product or service rating  12.5%   9 
 Gaining user input (Dell IdeaStorm)  4.2%   3 
 Other form of rating  2.8%   2 

answered question   72 

skipped question   2 

What made you choose to try Pligg?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Saw another site using it  16.4%   12 
 Wanted a site like Digg.com  68.5%   50 
 Searched for a read/submit/vote CMS  45.2%   33 
 Referred to Pligg from someone else  6.9%   5 

answered question   73 

skipped question   1 

How would you rate Pligg in each of these areas?

Bad Below Average Average Good Great Rating Average Response
Count
Ease of Installation 4.1% (3) 8.2% (6) 11.0% (8) 42.5% (31) 34.2% (25) 3.95  73 
Ease of Customization 11.0% (8) 16.4% (12) 42.5% (31) 24.7% (18) 5.5% (4) 2.97  73 
Performance (load times and server resources) 2.7% (2) 16.4% (12) 49.3% (36) 28.8% (21) 2.7% (2) 3.12  73 
Forum Support 2.8% (2) 11.1% (8) 31.9% (23) 31.9% (23) 22.2% (16) 3.60  72 
Documentation (wiki/readme/tutorials) 14.1% (10) 28.2% (20) 33.8% (24) 15.5% (11) 8.5% (6) 2.76  71 
Overall Experience 0.0% (0) 8.2% (6) 28.8% (21) 41.1% (30) 21.9% (16) 3.77  73 

answered question   73 

skipped question   1 

What areas would you like to see Pligg improve upon?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Documentation  54.8%   40 
 Better Performance  61.6%   45 
 Hosted Solutions  5.5%   4 
 Premium/Paid Services  15.1%   11 
 More Templates  67.1%   49 
 More Modules  69.9%   51 
 New Homepage  12.3%   9 
 Forum Support  27.4%   20 
Other (specifics offered later)  
 14 

answered question   73 

skipped question   1 
How often do you visit pligg.com?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Rarely, only to check for updates  15.9%   11 
 A few times a month  18.8%   13 
 A few times a week  33.3%   23 
 A few times a day  15.9%   11 
 I live on pligg.com  15.9%   11 

answered question   69 

skipped question   5 

Pligg plans on using its CMS on pligg.com. What information would you find beneficial in addition to a demo of Pligg on the redesigned homepage?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Featured Pligg Sites  60.9%   42 
 Testimonials from Pligg Users  21.7%   15 
 Pligg Tips and Tutorials  88.4%   61 
 FAQ  55.1%   38 
 Hosting Advise  18.8%   13 
 Statistics about Pligg  39.1%   27 
 Latest forum posts  36.2%   25 

answered question   69 

skipped question   5 

What categories would you like to see on the new Pligg.com?
Response
Percent		 Response
Count
 Web News  20.0%   13 
 Web Design  52.3%   34 
 CMS News  36.9%   24 
 Pligg News  78.5%   51 
 Technology News  29.2%   19 
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pligg: Pligg Blog

SuperGu Copyrights Pligg Code, Sends C&D

Digg this entry here.

In recent weeks Pligg has received two letters from SuperGu (SG) and their law firm. The first letter stated that Pligg’s template yget infringed on SuperGu’s copyright. At first we wondered how could this be since SuperGu has never released any code and the beta code they did release (SuperGu 1.3) was a template that was ported to be used with Meneame as a base. For those not familiar with Meneame, Pligg forked from it over a year ago. Meneame is based on the Affero General Public License (that’s why Pligg uses it, too). The beta that SG released would have fallen under this license, also.

Some of the claims SuperGu made was that they held copyrights to the following features: 1) Pagination (the next and previous page buttons) - SG claimed that Pligg’s pagination is too similar to theirs. 2) “Powered by Pligg” - SG claimed that the verbiage is too similar to their “Powered by SuperGu” so we have to remove it. 3) RSS feed icon - Yes, SG claimed they owned the copyright to the orange RSS feed icon. After some research we found that Mozilla actually owns the rights to it. These are just a few of the many claims SG made in their first letter sent to Pligg. Overall, there were almost 15 so called “copyright infringements.”

Pligg’s law firm sent SG a letter back a few days later asking for proof of copyright. It has now been over a week and we received another letter. Let me take you back a few days. After sending letter back to SG’s first letter we came across some files that were publicly accessible on supergu.com but have since been removed. There was one very interesting file that got my attention called ‘notes.txt’. The contents of ‘notes.txt’ are copied below. The only change is that we removed his email address.

Alex,

Thank you for working on this project!

If you would be so kind…

1. Please use my files located here: http://www.hostcity.com/files/ as I have
modified them to suit my needs. The meneamesg.zip file is my version of
meneame, converted into English. The pligg-9.1.zip file has been modified
also. I’ve deleted the templates I am not interested in. The template to
clone is ‘yget’.

2. Pligg history: At its core, Pligg is built on Meneame. The main difference
is Pligg added the Smarty templating system. I DO NOT NEED SMARTY as I will
NOT be sharing this software with anyone. Please do NOT add Smarty to my
version of Meneame as I do not need it. Thanks.

I am only interested in cloning the ‘Yget’ template found in Pligg here:
pligg/templates/yget/

3. Your mission is to clone the yget template including it’s functionality
(ajax, javascript, images, css) and adapt it to meneamesg.

I do not want to lose any of meneamesg’s functionality at this time, so
please be careful to comment and note any necessary changes. I understand
there are differences between Pligg and Meneamesg, and I wish to maintain
the meneamesg functionality as much as possible.

4. Please comment php code and make as many notes as you can, thanks.

5. I’ve moved some things around like the sidebar from right to left, etc.
Please look at my sample image located here:
http://www.hostcity.com/files/newsite.jpg.

6. The opening page should display ‘Register’ instead of ‘Login’ as
denoted in the newsite.jpg image. The ‘Register’ dialog box should read:
“Every article on this web sitewas submitted and voted on by its members.
Join us to submit, discuss,and promote the news that’s important to you!”

7. Please please do NOT contact anyone at pligg.com or pligg.com/forum for
help or questions about this project. Thanks.

If you have any questions, please email me. I will do my best to quickly
respond to your inquiries.

Once again, thanks for assisting me with this project!

Sincerely,

James Phelps
http://www.hostcity.com
http://www.flickboy.com (my pligg reference site)
http://www.sortby.us (meneamesg ref site)

Yes, you read that write. James Phelps, the SuperGu “owner” has hired someone to copy the template he just sent us a Cease and Desist over.

Now that you’ve seen this lets move on to the second letter Pligg received from SG. This letter was received after finding the notes.txt file copied above. The second letter received from SG contained a photocopy of the copyright form and the copyrighted SG material.

Lets take a look at the copyright document and see when SG created this so called “copyrighted material”

Notice that the work creation date was in 2005. Also note that date of publication of Jan. 1st 2006. Both of these dates were made up and SG must have lied on this copyright form. Meneame released their code, which the old SuperGu was based off of, in December of 2005. SuperGu didn’t even come into existence until mid-2006. The first Published date of SuperGu’s work was late Summer 2006, months after Pligg had been in development using the Mollio (mollio-beat) template. Now lets get to the good part. Lets see what SG spent so much time and effort on that they felt the need to copyright. If you take a look pages 8-18 in the PDF below you will see that SuperGu has filed a copyright for Pligg’s CSS code!

The code SuperGu claims to copyright is a direct copy and paste from this changeset on Pligg’s Source forge log http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pl…89&view=markup

Remember, SG has never released any code so how can they claim that we copied their CSS code when their code has never been released to anyone?? Another thing, the code in the C&D letter includes many code snip-its that Pligg coders personally wrote. Pligg has been using a variation of this CSS since the conception of Mollio-beat template on 4/19/2005 http://www.pligg.com/forum/showthread.php?t=643
This template and it’s CSS (which is most of the CSS in the C&D letter) was created by beatniak months before SG was ever thought of. If this doens’t convince than I don’t know what will.

We felt the need to make this public because this cease and desist is ridiculous and the copyright application is infringing on our, along with other web designers, work. Pligg has contacted the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation about this case and we are seeking help from anyone who specializes in internet copyright and patents. If you, or someone you know, has a wealth of experience in these areas please have them contact pligger@gmail.com with contact info and any information that might be useful for Pligg.

The following document includes all of the legal papers received by Pligg.
High quality (20.3 mb) PDF

* Rapidshare.com Mirror
* Megaupload Mirror
* Yousendit Mirror

Medium Quality (7.7 mb) PDF (right click, save as)

* Pligg.com Mirror
* DreamNut.com Mirror

pligg: Pligg Blog

Yet Another Server Change

We changed our hosting over to a DreamHost server about a month ago to try to lessen our downtime from the previous server, but it looks like a standard account on DreamHost isn’t enough for Pligg.com. We are going to attempt to upgrade the server from a shared hosting account on DreamHost to a VPS account on Midphase. Midphase seems to offer great service and support and unlike DreamHost they have both VPS and Dedicated plans to choose from. The server change will happen sometime over the next few days and after the move we should be set at least for the rest of this year. Hopefully the move will be the last time we see downtime. Like the previous move that we made recently, it will take a while for some nameservers to update appropriately. Please be aware that some posts on the forum/wiki will be lost during the transfer due to nameserver syncing. Thanks for your patience and understanding everyone, we’re doing our best to accommodate the large amount of traffic that’s being driven to Pligg.com.

pligg: Pligg Blog

Commercial web scripts worth your money

Open source scripts are great and all, but sometimes authors of web scripts need to make a few extra bucks or even a full time career from their hard work. This blog entry is dedicated to some of my favorite commercial web scripts that I have purchased in the past, and why I decided to drop my hard earned cash on them.

vBulletin

The first script I would like to talk about is vBulletin. This forum script has two price ranges that might seem steep for most casual web developers. A $160 option lets you run the script indefinitely with one years worth of updates, the $85 dollar option leases the script for one year at a time and as long as you continue your annual lease you can keep getting the latest updates. Both of these options only let you run vBulletin on a single domain for a year and get you access to view all of the content on vBulletin.org, a support forum for vBulletin. vBulletin.org offers a lot of great modifications, templates and other amazing resources for helping you setup your site. vBulletin is worth purchasing in my case because it offers a humongous amount of features that you can control from the administration panel and the vBulletin community has a lot of great module authors willing to contribute their mods for free. Pligg’s forum runs about a couple dozen mods at this point in time, and every one of them is free. When I first purchased a license a year ago when Pligg first started I hesitated because $85 seemed like a lot when you compare vBulletin to other open source forum scripts like phpBB or Vanilla. If you have a chance to run a handful of open source forum scripts and then run vBulletin you will immediately see a difference in features that help demonstrate why it’s well worth your money to purchase a vBulletin license.

Mint
Mint

The next script that I use on Pligg.com is Mint. Mint functions as a very clean stats package for your site. Think of it as Google Analytics, only usable. I’ve always hated Google’s stats program because it’s really ugly and difficult to read at a quick glance. Mint makes things as easy as possible to read and offers add-ons called “peppers” to give you even more advanced stats. Mint costs a one time fee of $30, $19 to upgrade to the next major version. I’ve had to pay for both the original fee and the upgrade and I haven’t been amazed by the difference between Mint 1.x and Mint 2.x. Let me also mention that Mint’s website design is pretty awesome and I applaud them for their original design and interface.
See a demo of Mint by clicking here.

Tufat.com is probably one of my favorite commercial script sites because everything offered by the author is just $5. The author even has a few free scripts like osDate and MyBackup (highly suggested). Don’t think that paying just $5 is going to bite you in the butt in the end, Tufat scripts include free upgrades and they even have a support forum. Some of his more popular scripts are FlashChat and FlashBB.

pligg: Pligg Blog

February Donation Drive a Success!

In just a few weeks we were able to reach our donation drive goal of $1,000. A lot of people have been wondering where our money is going to, so this post will detail exactly that. Our first plan is to file for nonprofit status and some other legal documents. We have wanted to form a 501(c)3 for several months now, but we never had enough money to comfortably spend money and still have enough left over for other purposes. Our goal for the next few months is to keep a mininum of $1,000 in the “Pliggy Bank” in case of a rainy day. We want to keep a thousand dollar buffer mostly because we are fearing that it will be needed some day to pay some small legal fees.

Last night I took a look at some nonprofit forms trying to figure out what I needed to do to start filing the papers. I realized during this process that we have never written a manifesto or business outline for Pligg, which is required for when you file for nonprofit status. I’m not the best when it comes to legal papers, so I think that we will hire a company to assist us in filing for nonprofit status. If anyone out there has a connection to someone who has experience in this area and is able to help out let me know. We need to draft a business objective and summary about who we are and what we represent.

pligg: Pligg Blog

New Pligg.com Features

This was a crazy-awesome week for Pligg. First, we purchased a new hosting package that we will be upgrading to soon. Hopefully the new host will be more reliable and will help cut some of the downtime. I’m also hoping for some speedier page load times, but that’s just icing on the cake.
Second, we added a new donations area to the site and added a link to the forum navigation bar. From now on, when you donate through this panel you will be marked as a “donor” on forum posts and on your forum profile. Your name will also be listed on the “Donors Page“. We are accepting donations as small as $10 and we are trying to raise $1,000 to help us pay the hosting costs and pay for some new templates. If you want to help promote Pligg’s donation drive feel free to post a the donation image bar that shows our progress.

Pligg Donations

The third new item is the brand new “Classifieds” page. We’ve noticed a huge amount of people asking for help who were willing to pay, so we gave them a place to post their requests. You can also buy and sell templates, modules and domains. All of these items must of course be built for Pligg specifically.

The last new feature is one that has been built in to Pligg’s forum for a couple weeks now. The downloads section is where you can find all of the free templates, modules, tutorials and Pligg releases. You will also find some miscellaneous items such as the vBulletin integration files. The new vBulletin integration files are being used on demo.pligg.com, where you can now log in to Pligg using your Pligg forum username and password.

Some of these new features are still not 100% rock solid, so if you experience any bugs let us know. I know there’s currently a problem with images displaying in the classifieds area, but I should have that resolved pretty soon. Let us know what you think of the new features because we are always interested in improving the site by adding or subtracting features. Happy pligging everyone! Oh, and check out the new RSS Page for the forum.

pligg: Pligg Blog