http://thenationalchampion.com

Some good points you made there.

There are many modules available for Drupal which allow you to have features like a friend-system, these include User Relationships, Buddylist, Buddylist2 and Friendlist all of which we can confirm work with a drigg based site. It’s also worth noting that Friendlist in particular is written and maintained by Tony Mobily the lead developer of Drigg.

As for resource consumption Drigg isn’t as bad as you may think especially if you are experienced with Memcache and SQL Cache, Drupal also has a few other features like Javascript Compression, CSS compression and block caching along with page caching. All of these combined will have a drigg site loading pretty fast and faster than any traffic pligg based site would run under similar load conditions. Drupal also supports multi-server setups something which Pligg doesn’t, when writing the article we took into account expandability and scalability which is something Drupal does very, very well.

OpenReddit is a great system but a very advanced system to setup, more advanced than most new website owners are comfortable with. When setting up or customizing openreddit you need knowledge of the technologies below.

Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached.

Other systems like Pligg, SWCMS and Drigg really only need Apache, PHP and MySQL to get started with and this configuration is available and present on most standard web hosting packages. We tried to write this article so that anyone who desired to setup their own social news site could, i agree reddit is great but a little too in depth for non geeks as you put it

With Drigg, I have heard some mentions of how the friends-system doesn’t work. Also, there is that integration with Elgg that is coming up in SWCMS, which is quite tempting. Despite my Pligg and WP experience (strictly on-geek experience), I found Drigg tough to figure out. Plus resource-consumption might be a serious issue with it.

You haven’t mentioned open-source Reddit as an option. Agreed that the instructions and setup would make non-geeks curl up and die – but if you look at reddit.com, it is extremely fast and user-friendly, not to mention their ranking algo is super.

I have started a site called Dgtlx.com driven by Pligg. I use Pligg but if this article is true then I may need to change to Drigg further on. Well, otherwise I have done a lot of the steps mentioned in this article. I have replaced the Pligg template with a new one. I don’t use rss feeds because of the reason you mentioned and I use one account to submit stories. I also have chosen to only include links to computer related information. Right now I don’t accept registration. I must get control of the spam block feature before I open the site to everyone. If you are interested, please take a look at my site Dgtlx.com. I opened the site a couple of days ago so don’t be too hard judging my new site.