Firstly talking about Akismet, yes i do use it on my personal blog and i have seen spam from hundreds coming down to single digits just because Akismet actually learns from what comments on our blog are spam and what are actual true comments. So Akismet does what its controller/admin tells it to do. If you block a specific domain once, it will be blocked till its told not to do so the next time. And i do agree about blog link spamming/blog post spamming as i see it in my blog all the time, they are actually automatic bots doing the dirty work. But that doesnt mean every link to a personal blog is spam. I hardly give out links to my blog to other websites, and if i remember properly i might have given it 2-3 times here for the whole year of 2009, i dont understand how its considered to be spam. I might share certain articles which i believe is not covered in any major website "yet", and i might be one of the very few covering some event or review of a service.Getting on to the newsbot case, i agree it complements this forum to some extent. But do check on how many people actually look at those posts or comment on them. If one out of hundred posts are being acknowledged by your members, i consider the rest 99 percent as spam and unnecessary content. And if the majority of the posts are nothing but autoposts by a bot, i personally wouldnt be interested and most of those news/articles would be available online on major website way before it is being posted here and i would have already read most of them.Let me know if i am the only one thinking about all of this.