The URL of this blog has changed, from http://spaces.msn.com/auburnmarshes to http://auburnmarshes.spaces.msn.com.  This is apparently to enable better scalability and responsiveness of MSN Spaces as it passes the 100 million user mark!  I appreciate the fact that, while this change has technical benefits, it also puts the user’s name right up front, which is a nice user-centric feature.  A win-win!

Apparently the IE7 picture uploading bug has been fixed too, which is nice (believe it or not, I resorted to Firefox - which I only use for cross-browser compatibility checking! Really! -  to upload my most recent blog image).

While I’m at it, I have another feature request too.  I recently had somebody unknown to me make some short and insipid comments (like "I like it!").  These show up as recent comments when I "Edit My Space".  Usually I can tell from this display whether somebody has spammed my blog, and delete the comments quickly.

However, the list only shows the most recent five comments.  Those five comments could mask other comments, which may represent spam.  I went through all my comments, at significant time expense, to see whether these comments were masking spam.  In this case I concluded not, but it alerted me to a new spamming strategy.  Comment-spammers please stop reading now.  Spam with a bunch of comments, then make 5 insipid but un-delete-worthy comments to mask the bad stuff from delete-conscious blog owners.

The most recent 5 blog entries show in the "Edit My Space" view, and one can switch to the "Blog" tab to page through a complete list and delete blog entries.  A reasonable counter-measure against masked comment spam would be to offer a corresponding "Comments" tab to page through a complete list of comments (most recent first).  Failing that, a "next 5" link would help.