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The WordPress community has a lot to be excited about this week. BuddyPress and bbPress have pushed out major new releases today. WordPress users looking for a simple way to enable forums and/or add social media features should take a look. The bbPress 2.0 release integrates forum features into any standard WordPress theme. BuddyPress 1.5 brings a better default theme and performance improvements.

Even though we have lots of tools to detect blog comment spam these days, spammers always tend to be one step ahead of our algorithms. While early blog spam was often posted by robots and easily detectable, today's blog spammers are smarter. Instead of relying on robots, the team behind Automaticc's Akismet spam filter reports that modern blog spam is often written by low-paid workers in India, South-East Asia and Turkey.

Om Malik reported this evening that Automattic raised a $29.5 million Series B venture round led by Polaris Ventures, and including previous investors True Ventures and Radar Ventures. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the news is that the New York Times Company is also joining the round, making a strategic investment in Automattic, who are the creators of the widely used Wordpress blogging platform.