The original Font Police site, which was started as a gag, is no more. Its entries have been moved to a Tumblr blog, and can still be reached using the fontpolice.org URL.
   The problem was Pligg. This was our second attempt at administering a site using Pligg, and the second time we have given up on it.
   While the support was excellent—and I thank ‘Yankidank’ for all the timely help I received to every question—Pligg seemed to be very easy exploited by spammers. They would add fake links and comments every day, and by the end I had somewhere close to 500 fake registrants and about four legit ones. I went into the site more to weed out spammers than have fun, which was the original point.
   I was not on the latest version (mine was 1.0.1; the latest is 1.0.3), so I cannot comment on whether Pligg has fixed its problem with spammers.
   The previous Pligg installation, which we tried to incorporate in to the Lucire website, died because I could not get any answers on the support boards.
   Since contributions to Font Police were emailed to me anyway, there seemed little need to have a Digg-type interface as I originally envisaged.
   Those who have followed my ongoing troubles with Vox since October 28—the site has a glitch that prevents me from composing new blog posts—will know that I went to my old Tumblr blog, which I started in 2007, as a stand-by. It was reacquainting myself with that service that led me to think that Tumblr might work for something as simple as Font Police.
   Not that Tumblr was without its issues. If one wants to set up a custom domain, Tumblr provides an IP address and advises that it be entered in to the domain name’s A records. Unfortunately, Bulkregister (who handles our domain name registrations) did not like the IP address and claimed it was invalid. I had to set up a forwarding hosting account on our server to redirect people to the Tumblr blog.
   I imagine that having most of the pages at tumblr.com won’t do the fontpolice.org domain any favours when it comes to search engine ranking, but for now it’s an acceptable price to pay to stop spammers from getting extra links to dodgy websites at my expense. That can only be good for the internet at large. Posted by Jack Yan, 08:17  permalink

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