Lao Voices

Laoplanet.net is renewed, yet again. As you might have noticed, after the server meltdown of our hosting company we created a new Laoplanet in August 2007 based on Pligg software. Through this software, anyone could add content and link to content together with a voting / ranking ability.

However, there are three main reasons why we moved away from the Pligg software at Laoplanet.

1) Speed. Manually adding of content items was a tedious task that really slowed the process of news gathering down. The current software is fast and keeps up with the latest news with great ease.

2) The new Laoplanet is based on the improved concept of news aggregation and storage. By searching, filtering and storing news items in the database, our users may search a particular news item at any given time. With this, Laoplanet aims to become the main Lao news aggregator, especially since Vientianetimes.com has, recently and allegedly, ceased to provide this service.

3) Security. We found out that there are truck sized security holes in the Pligg software that could possibly harm our databases and leave it vulnerable to spammers and (script) hackers. The open source Pligg community is very small and, unfortunately, does not enforce a minimally acceptable security level as we like to see it.

We are excited about the new functionality of Laoplanet news. Have a look at the new and improved Laoplanet and please notify us if you feel we have missed an important source of Lao news or blogs. We’ll be happy to add it to the list. Much appreciated!