How i created Newskicks with drupal 5.0 ?

Few years back i was desperatly looking for a digg clone script.I was willing find an open source script which does all my work but to my bad luck i did not find anything.After that i come to know about pligg, it was a digg clone and to test that i registered this domain and installed pligg on it.but pligg was in very early stages of deve,pment and it was not stable,more it was not having all the features nor good themes so i installed two version if pligg but then i gave up because there are frequent changes and i can not upgrade a site each month.So then i decided to use drupal.i find simple post on how to create your digg cline with drupal using voting api and voting up down module,but those are very basic sites.so i have decided to improve those stuff and finally what you currently is not a black magic,but its the power of drupal and its modules.
There are various modules i am using on this site.Some of them were buggy and not were not working properly.i spent lots of time in debugging them and correcting them.for exampls the voting action module which i m using on this site to handle the story promotion on frontpage on receiving the specified voted,demote them from front page on getting the vote less then the specified vote was buggy.It tooks me days to fix it because i was not having much idea on drupal's moduler architecure and i never coded in it.but then by debugging them i was able to fix them.It was a simple bug where the number of voted required to promote a story to the front page were gettting compared to the current vote that is always 1 rather then comparing to the sum of votes.so stories were not getting promoted to the front page.
so to fix that i taken some of all the votes and then compared that to the voted required to promote the story on front page.
Then there are problems with the storylink modules.It has limited features which are hardcoded.for example you can not post more then 600 characters,the URL field is necessary etc.so i have to digg through all of these issues.
In this article i am going to share my experiance in detail.

The Idea:-My idea was to provide a site where users can share almost anything.where it is a news article or video or audio in any format.i dont want to put the barrier of site dependency like you can only submit videos from YouTube or MetaCafe or you can only submit audio in the MP3 format or image should be JPEG only.
I certainly don't like such things,i want to give freedom to my users to use anythng they want.like some user may want youtube while some like google videos.so i have to keep that my site should not become the dependent on any other site.Another thing was to provide the social networking features,so that users can interact with each others.i don't want that users come on my site just vote and leave away.what i want is user come here,stay here, enjoy this site watch videos,movies,images,news whatever they want and make new friends and get to know each others.can message each others,and have a unique page on this site which show how much they love it.
Loyal user base are the person who are behind the success of any site.i want to get loyal users,who belive in this site and love it!!
mind you if i get 100 of such users then its more then getting thousads of visitors from other sources who just come, check and leave.

that's my primary GOAL,Motive behind this site.

Requirements:-Based up on the idea,i have finalised following requirements:
1)It will be a user powered site where user will submit stories and vote for them.Vote can be either positive or negative.On getting number of positive votes story should be promoted to front page and on getting the votes bellow it,stories shoud be demoted from there.
if for any story total vote become less then certain amount then it should be considered as uninteresting and should be unpublished.
2)Site should have the social networking features,initially i did tried displaying the conents on front page like videos,imaged etc but it slows down the site speed so i have made the cororection to display onlt the title of the story like reddit and then on clicking on view full story a user can view the full story.
3)Spam protection:-when u start such sites,spammers run behind you.many people submit adds to viagra,porn etc.so it was necessary to protect from such submission for it i have used to option,one is a bayesing filter which learn by itself and another is the ability for any user to mark a node as spam or flag a node.

How i made it using drupal:- Before selecting drupal i evaluted number of other CMS like pligg,joomla,postnuke but none of them offer the raw features and base on which you can built and scale such a site.so i have decided to go with drupal.besides that drupal has lots of modules and other CMS does not have,so using drupal means less coding.
I have searched lots of modules,tried many of them and removed them and finally i have handpicked some of the best modules which suits myneeds.following are some of the modules i am using on this site:-
1)CoolFilter:-Nice module,all the embeding features on this site are due to this module.
2)mysite:-All the social networking module are due to this.
3)VoteUpDown:-for voting up and down stories.
4)VotingActions:-for promoting stories to front page and demoting them.
5)spam:-provides good spam protection.
6)storylink:-all the links you submit on this sites are taken care by this module.
and some other which are not required but makes this site usable on someway.

As drupal handles all the task,my work was simply finding the right modules and modify some of them to work according to my needs.as it is a user powered site so i am using vote_up_down and storylink module.user can submit the story link on this site and then other user can vote for it.if a story receive more then 5 votes then it is promoted to the front page using voting action module.For all the Media stuff i have used cool filter module,it nicely handles all the websites like youtube,metacafe,audio and image files.Then there are number of other modules which do other work like spam and captch module help me to keep this site clean and then there are tracback and pathauto modules which take care of SEO stuff.I am also using google adsense module which supports revenue sharing.
This is how i made it,feel free to contact me at admin@newskicks.com if you have any questions.

Thanks & Regards,
Admin