DWS Extra

Recently, we started a Digg-like Formula One social news bookmarking site using the popular open source script Pligg.

To a large extent, it runs well.I am no PHP or database expert and can barely edit a CSS file, but have managed to successfully install it on a few domains, and this was no different.

Today, however, was a bad day. I had known about the tag inaccuracies in Pligg for a long time. But while searching for some information on the upcoming F1 race - the Turkish Grand Prix - in the new Pligg site, I noticed something which was really, really, bad.

There are several stories in the site about the Turkish Grand Prix, but clicking on the tag which says Turkish Grand Prix presents a age of results which have nothing to do with the tag at all. The tag-result page shows info on the European Grand Prix, Nurburgring, Hungaroring and all - but the stories with the appropriate tag do not appear in the first page of results at all.

Imagine how embarrassing this is. A user clicks on the tag, and he gets results which have nothing to do with it. Click on a driver’s name, and you may or may not get stories with his name in the tags.

I have posted this in the Pligg forum, and am still waiting for a response.

I know some of you are going to jump on me saying its open-source, and I should piss off and have no right to complain. That is a much larger discussion, and I am not going to get into that. However, open-source or not, I think it totally disappointing to have such a feature-failure in such a high-profile Digg clone script.

That is why I went for corank as the platform on which to build another one of my sites. The Corank  platform has its idiosyncracies - their core idea of people adding each other as sources - does not work at all when you are dealing with small communities. Often, you end up on pages with stories from the one or two sources you have added, and think that the site is almost empty — till you click on the site logo and reach the real homepage, not the home.html which confuses you totally. And their comments allow 5000 characters, while the actual story submission allows only 500 - despite assurances from RBA who owns corank, this is still not fixed after 2 months. But yes, their tags work, and beautifully too. And the overall system is massively fast compared to Pligg.

If only the tags would work as advertised in Pligg… If you are a Pligg coder or familiar with open-source enough to fix this, do let me know. Or better still, help me fix this and then post it in the Pligg forum so Pliggers can benefit from it.