Jamie Thomson, an avid blogger and Windows Live enthusiast, blogs regularly on his Spaces blog about Windows Live, but today he had enough.  Having to deal with and delete 51 comment spam posts on a recent blog entry in the space of an hour got the best of him, and he fired off a rant, calling out Spaces for their perceived lack of attention to comment spam:

As happy as I am to see Windows Live Wave 3 rolling out this week and as much as I offer my thanks and congratulations to the people that built it I can no longer hide my anger and resentment toward those same people –some of which I have met and dined with- that have habitually failed to address this rampant abuse of Live Spaces. Why is this not a priority?

Luckily for Jamie, one of the comments on to his rant he didn’t delete was from Marcus Schmidt from Microsoft, who responded with a list of what Spaces is and will be doing about comment spam, starting with the new release that we’re expecting at any time now from www.spaces.live.com:

I’ve talked to the Spaces team and this is what we’re doing with the Wave 3 release that is rolling out today to help mitigate the spam problem:

1.  We’ve taken some measures on the backend that will reduce the amount of comment spam

2.  We’re actively looking for and disabling spammer accounts

3.  We’ve built a better recent comments page that will allow you to see up to 50 recent comments on one page and delete any spam comments from that page.

4.  We’re continuing to invest in anti-spam and abuse measures that will roll out in future releases.

Plus we’re doing some more secretive stuff that I can’t really declare publicly because it would tip off the spammers.

Good to hear from Marcus and Spaces on this, and although the comment spam issue is a lot bigger than Spaces (it’s why we ask you to log in to LiveSide to leave a comment, for example), spam is never fun to deal with.