It’s easier than ever to gather donations for adding features to Pligg now that we use ChipIn to easily add donation widgets to threads. You can see the new feature in action on the Pligg Projects page, helping us gather contributions for adding new features to Pligg. With ChipIn it’s easy to gather donations from multiple people to fund development.

Somehow for the past several months it slipped by me that the Pligg forum has been requiring users to log in to a forum account to download anything from any of the forums. That was definitely not my intent, and I now understand some of the frustrations that I’ve heard from users about how the main Pligg download isn’t easy to access. This will be a lesson to me to be more careful about checking the small details, you would have thought that I would have learned through all of the bug testing I do with Pligg.

Downloads in the forum have been straightened out, now you can download the latest version of Pligg without having to register for an account.  Not only can you get the latest version of Pligg, but now the Pligg Templates and Pligg Modules forums are open for download without registration so now you can get all the free templates and modules without having an account. Of course, if you want support you should register an account, and even consider registering just to receive important email updates if a security threat is discovered.

I have decided tonight to retire the Downloads link from the top menu across the site because the forum downloads section wasn’t flexible enough to meet the needs of Pligg users. We no longer have a centralized file area, instead we will rely on forum thread attachments for downloads.

In an effort to reduce spam posts we have installed the vBulletin module “Spambuster” on the Pligg forum. The plugin automatically detects spam based on a point system that checks keywords from users who haven’t posted much. Any posts that it thinks might be spam are automatically turned invisible and a thread is created for moderators to review the post and deal with it appropriately.

In the past we have been getting cell phone advertisements almost daily, but it looks like the new spam detection program will prevent that from ever happening again. In case you are a relatively new forum user and you find that your posts aren’t showing up after submitting them, please take into consideration that this may be because it used words that our spam protection program might have flagged. If you find yourself in this situation please give a few hours for one of the Pligg forum moderators to check and approve your post.