When I joined MyBlogLog back in February, I tried to only join communities where I was reading the blog. This kept the number that I was a member of down and even now I am only a member of 84 communities. As time moves on some of these are less regularly visited than others and in a lot of cases using the RSS feed means that I only visit if I want to leave a comment.

It always annoyed me when I was left messages in the community or to me in public with links in. I always ranted to myself that if I wanted to follow up on the message, I was quite capable of clicking on the avatars and finding the blog without a link. I know it was really advertising the blog to search engines and anyone who could read it. After I put a note in my profile for no links, any messages left with links got deleted regardless of the content. If the message was sent in private that wasn’t a problem as the person had taken the time to send me information rather than using me as advertising.

The community idea of MyBlogLog is great and I have found many great blogs by searching the community of a blog I enjoy. For this reason, I have also joined communities that I have found interesting as I may have similar interests to other visitors to that blog. I can see how some people who are very active and spend a lot of time promoting their blogs can be members of hundreds or thousands of communities. However, just because I have shown an interest in the blog and joined the community does not mean that I want to start receiving mass mailings sent to that community. In many other groups and forums you have to agree to receive this type of mailing and so to suddenly have this introduced with no option to disable mass community messages other than leave the community, I am not exactly over the moon. As Ilker pointed out on The MyBlogLog Blog comments , an issue with this is that the messages are not sent in private, which means that the message and any spam links are visible for all to see including search engines, so not only do you get unrequested messages but you are an advertising hording for someone else. In Ilker’s case the more popular you are the more advertising you give.

This wasn’t going to be a rant about the new ability on MyBlogLog to sent messages to all your community members in one go, but it sort of ended up as one. I shall be watching to see what changes are introduced.

That said, the other changes to the community page are great.