I am giving up on Pligg, very little support (especially after it went up for sale) and its a very bloated cms. I upgraded to a newer version, stuff stopped working, links not working. This is still Beta, and at the pace they are going it be for a few years. I wish that instead of trying to add features, the dev team concentrated on making it work. I would rather have less features but a solid and stable cms. I just took a look at phpdug and it looks ultra fast , it doesn't have as many bells and whistles but if you need a basic digg clone it should work. It looks like phpdug would be easier to customize to meet your seo needs.
I tried installing Pligg. I was going to hire a developer to modify the script to harden up the anti-spam protection, which is really quite poor on Pligg. However, I hit lots of bugs, couldn't get any answers (the script is really difficult to understand and debug), so I gave up after a couple of days. There seems to be lots of stability problems with the script. I looked at PHPDug. Went to the forum and asked a question. Didn't get any response after a few days, so I gave up on that one. I ended up using Corank, on LINKS which is a white label, hosted solution. It works very well. Very reliable and decent support (a bit sporadic). This, however, is a temporary solution since Corank owns all of the data. However, on the plus side, all of the pages are being rapidly indexed and the SEO is good. As a result I am getting about 650 visitors a day after a couple of days, with very good Google indexing. A decent solution for someone who wants to quickly build a Digg-like site. Rich
Corank is not a script. It is a hosted application. You sign up for the service, setup your Digg-like site, and then, if you want, have your domain/sub-domain point to the service, or use their url: eg. yourdomain.corank.com. Hope this explains. Rich
I've had experience with both. Pligg is prettier with more features and flair, but its got soooo much stuff thats it can get really complicated to manage, especially when making modifications/customizations. Also, their RSS Importer doesn't work well/is impossible to get running. Phpdug is a lot "lighter," but runs faster and is very easy to use and manage. Importing feeds takes about 5 seconds. As for SEO: both offer mod_rewrite support for SEO friendly URLs so not much difference there. If you don't need all the features and flair of pligg, its not worth the trouble.
I have used Pligg and Drigg (digg clone on drupal). Pligg is faster to get going. Drigg runs on drupal so it has access to more features but you've got the headaches of learning Drupal. Both are full of hideous snags. Drigg has a nice set of auto voting features as well as importing. I'm also starting to look into the open source version of Reddit which sounds promising but I'm not sure I want to learn python.
The reddit open source project is the best Digg type "clone" you will get, but as mentioned, its written in Python. A good thing if you are a programmer as python is easy, but a bad thing if you know no to little php, as you will be lost. Personally I stay a way from anything like Pligg. If I want something doing like that, I will build it myself (or get someone to do it for me). It gives you a better end results in so many ways - speed, functionality, etc. As far as I know, no site using pligg has ever become popular, so it probably isn't even designed to scale at all.
I've just finished installing drigg for a niche site at carnival of making money online - it is not nearly as easy to set up as pligg. I set up and customized pligg pretty heavily in two days, and a basic install of drigg took two days. Drigg doesn't have an external vote button (yet) either. That said, i'm going with drigg from now on (sucker for the drupal community).
I am interested in PHPDUG. But can someone say me how to install it in domains if web hosts dont provide the script to install it automatically
Pligg is definitely in its early stages so I would look for an alternative such as a Digg clone script or you can just use PHPDugg.