[The Humanaught]

Chuck, sorry, I didn't mean to be negative, and of course I am grateful for what the developers have done thus far on Pligg. I've been around these forums for long enough to know not to speak lightly on things, and think I've contributed enough to at the very least speak my mind about this.

I feel that the energy going into creating the pro section would be better spent on creating a better system by which people can submit themes, plugins, etc. under a GPL. I, for one, would love to create some Pligg themes, but can't be bothered to put the time into it while there's still so much that is hard-coded and therefore needs to be adjusted with every release - a pain for the designer/developer and a pain for the end user who has to go and upgrade their theme and then re-customize it all again.

Of course there's going to be "non-affiliated" Pligg service sites. Look at any OS project. Take Joomla. There are a sea of developer sites (many pay), but Joomla.org maintains its priority as creating strong core code, creating support documents and furthering the project. Sure people can offer pay-addons in the extensions section along side the copious amounts of free ones, and if that's what the Pro section was (a collection of free and pay addons), then I'd agree with it, as it promotes growth, not monetization.

But other than the forum, and a sparse download repository, there's nothing of the likes here.

You say it was created because of user demand, and this doesn't surprise me at all. The reason for the user-demand is because Pligg, relative to other os-cms projects, is a complete pain to work with, and site developers would rather just pay someone to solve the problems for them.

In regards to Pligg's expenses. We're all developers, few of us don't understand the costs involved of running a site such as this. So, if we're just speaking bare costs (and not turning profit), I am not real clear on why all the advertising on the site isn't covering that.

Perhaps it's only because I work with so many open source projects that my expectations are what they are. I love Pligg, I really do. I just hate to see a shop being set up to sell stuff for a product that doesn't even really work properly yet.

And I particularly dislike being told that I need to pay to protect myself against spam - which in my opinion is core functionality for any Web 2.0 product.