Pliggs

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This has crossed my mind a few times in the past, but never gave it a lot of thought until now.

There is one feature in the Pligg script that really shouldn’t be there and makes absolutely no sense. Can you guess what it is?

Its the javascript at the end of every news item submitted labeled:

Share this on… or Save this to…

There are a couple of reasons using this makes no sense, after deep thinking you may come up with more, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind for me:

Submission Guidelines:

Most if not all Pligg sites have the following on step 1 of the submission process:

Please follow a few simple guidelines to make this site a better place:

• Quality Content: Is your story relevant to the site?
• Link Directly to the Source: Save people time by linking directly to the original story.
• Search First: Avoid duplicate submissions by searching to make sure someone else has not submitted the story already.
• Be Descriptive: You are the story editor, so explain what it is and why it is cool.

Note the second guideline, Save people time by linking directly to the original story, we are asking members to link directly to the source, not a Digg page showing an excerpt of the story.

Then, we are asking other members who are voting, to submit excerpt posted to our Pligg sites to Digg, so that Digg users can be brought to an excerpt of the original story.

Members should be posting original URLs, not a page from Digg, therefore, lets not ask them to post a URL to a story on our Pligg stories to Digg.

Competition:

One of the reasons Digg, Mixx etc…, don’t have this option, is because it makes no sense at all to send your members to another social networking site. They want you to stay on theirs and browse, submit, vote and discuss the items they have, not what their competition has.

Annoying:

It annoys visitors when they see a story of Digg, for example, that leads them to the same story on Mixx, for example, where they need to click yet again to get to the original source. Users want things to be simple, if they want to vote for the story on Mixx or Digg, they will go to those sites and vote for it.

Conclusion:

I will be removing this feature on both of my Pligg sites today, there are only a few features you need to have on each item:

1. Submitters username
2. Source
3. When it was submitted
4. Tags
5. Category
6. Description
7. Method to share with friends, i.e., email
8. Thumbshot of source URL
9. The ‘Bury’ feature if used on your Pligg

Will you be removing this from yours?

You can disable this feature simply from the Admin Panel:

Configure Pligg > Summary > Enable AddTo > Set this option to “False”, currently is will be set to “True”

Or, this can be done manually via the link_summary.tpl file located in your template folder.

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