Eric from MyBlogLog has written a post on their blog explaining some of the problems that they’ve been facing on the spam front over the last little while and outlining some of the things that they’ve done (and are going to do) about it. I won’t rehash it all here -but for the fill post head over to The MyBlogLog Blog: Weekend spamtacular — what the heck happened and how we’re fixing it.

I’m particularly happy about #3:

3) We will include the text of the comment and associated controls (delete,reply, etc) in the alert email. You won’t have to go to MyBlogLog to manage comments on your profile or community page any more.

That’s something I suggested (I’m sure others did too) and it’ll save me considerable time.

ProBlogger’s MyBlogLog community has continued to grow in number over the last couple of weeks since I added it to my sidebar however the last few days have given me numerous reasons to wonder if I continue with it.

Community Message Spam – I am increasingly spending time deleting spammy comments left on the community from members. While I’m not overly concerned by the ‘check out my community/site/blog’ comments (although leaving a comment like that’s not really incentive for anyone to check out your community/site/blog in my experience) over the last few days I’ve had an increasing amount of ‘harder edged’ spam on my community – particularly linking to porn and drug sites.

The result is that I’m spending more and more time each day removing spam (something I have enough of with my email and blog comment spam).

I’ve suggested to MBL that they give community owners a higher level of moderation. Perhaps one way would be to not only send an email every time a comment is left with a link to the comment – but to include what the comment is as well as a link within the email to delete it (similarly to how WordPress does with comments).

Author Spam – Last night I received numerous invitations from other communities to join them as an author – despite the fact that I’ve never heard of the blogs (let alone the fact that I’ve not written on them). The communities in question listed hundreds of authors. Today a number of other bloggers posted that they’d been added as authors on blogs that they didn’t write on including ShoeMoney, John Chow, Danny Sullivan and Web Metrics Guru. Reading the comments on these blogs shows that many others were spammed this way also. (The Jason Calacanis community also looks like a victim of this as he seems to have been made an ‘author’ of an SEO community).

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Over the last day or two I’ve been testing a tool that bloggers wanting to stay right on top of the news breaking in their niche might find very useful. It’s called Anothr and it’s an RSS bot for Skype users.

How does it work? – its pretty simple really. You add Anothr as a buddy on your Skype account, you subscribe over at the Anothr site with the feed you want updates on (lets use the random example of… hmmm…. ProBlogger’s feed). Add some tags and you’re done. When the feed you’ve subscribed to updates you’ll get a quick skype message delivered to you via skype.

Why would you want to use it? – While news aggregators are wonderful at helping you keep on top of the breaking stories around the blogosphere they only really work as fast as you check them (unless you have some sort of notification tool). If you’re like me, skype is a logical tool to use as a notification tool because I’m on it all day (more than I’m looking at my news aggregator).

I don’t use it with every feed that I’m subscribing to (it would be pinging you all day everyday) – however with those key blogs and sites that it’s really advantageous to be right on top of (as they break key news) this is well worth using.

There’s a few other cool features (you can subscribe to new feeds via skype, share your subscriptions (or keep them private), promote your blog on Another with widgets (see mine below).

Like I say – this is a tool for those of you looking to really stay on top of the news on a particular niche. If it’s crucial that you know when a feed’s published – this is a tool to check out.