A year or so back there was a flurry of MetaFilter clones, applications that did what the engine behind MetaFilter does so you could run your own version of MeFi should you so want to. At the time MeFi wasn’t letting in new users so there was a demand for the likes of MonkeyFilter et al.
Time does march so swiftly on the webernet.
For reasons that will eventually become clear, I’m in the market for a MeFi clone, but it appears the time has passed. MetaPhilter seems to have stalled and I can’t for the life of me find somewhere to download it from, FreeFilter just looks kinda scary (I will take another look at it when my head stops throbbing) and the explosion of copycat blogging tools has made figuring out what other CMS’s are like something of a headache.
What I want is basically the MeFi experience where anyone can sign up and post and moderators can be assigned to do the moderating. Actually, some kind of forum software that is malleable enough to be turned into a blog-style layout would do the trick.
Anyone got a clue on this?
FreeFilter looks like it should work, but everything appears to be squished into one Perl script so doesn’t promise to be especially easy to customize in terms of style (or anything, frankly). Probably worth a look though.
Phpilfer looks like it might be a flier, but have only briefly scanned it. http://www.holloway.co.nz/phpilfer/
There are two SourceForge projects, with reasonably well known names attached, neither of which have released any code in the last several years.
Googling around, that seems to be it. Who’d a thunk it.
Is it not possible to get a bit creative with MT, and force it into a MeFi-mode? Changes are WordPress could be manhandled similarly.
It’s the “anyone can register” and other forumy style moderation things that I’m thinking about. MT and I’m guessing WP don’t lend themselves to that sort of thing. Multiple authors on MT is a pain to manage for a start.
Of course, if there isn’t anything you can just whack in the cgi-bin then tweaking something else or even building from scratch (eek) would be an option. I’m just somewhat surprised.