Download websites that use Pligg

About Pligg

Some software on the public web is best understood as sediment. Pligg is community news software, built so that visitors submit links and vote them onto a front page, an idea that had its moment when social bookmarking looked like the future of discovery. The moment passed. The installations did not all come down with it.

Pligg is written in PHP and our record for it begins in 2005. The entry lists its licensing as Proprietary, which is worth quoting as a record rather than a verdict, since projects of this vintage change licence and stewardship more often than their installed base notices. As of October 2026 we still detect Pligg on 11 sites. A count of that kind, for software whose active development era is behind it, is measuring persistence rather than adoption, and persistence is its own subject.

For security work, persistence is the whole point. Abandoned or lightly maintained web applications keep accumulating unpatched issues while remaining perfectly reachable, and a voting and submission platform is by definition a site that accepts input from anonymous visitors. A population list is what a researcher needs in order to estimate exposure, notify the operators who can still be reached, or study how long a dormant platform keeps serving traffic after the project behind it goes quiet. None of that is possible one domain at a time, because the interesting property is the size and shape of the remaining population, not the status of any single host.

A second audience wants the domains rather than the software. Community link sites tend to be old, well indexed and full of user submitted content, which has made them a recurring target for spam and link selling, and a recurring subject for anyone studying either. A list of them is useful to the people cleaning that up, to search quality researchers measuring how much of it survives, and to anyone building a picture of where user generated link content still accumulates unattended.

Detection here rests on visible traces, template markup, asset paths and generator strings, and abandoned software is exactly the kind that gets modified by whoever inherited it. Heavily rethemed installations will be missed and stripped down ones may be ambiguous, so our figure is best read as installations that remain recognisable from the outside. For a platform whose interest lies precisely in the fact that nobody is maintaining it, an approximate population is still far more useful than checking addresses one by one and hoping to stumble across a live example.