Jasmine Spyer, take a hike

A fellow film blogger I've "known" since I first started blogging, who is a great writer and whose blog I should read more often, recently explained to me why he turned off commenting on his blog.

"I couldn't deal with all the spam," he said.

I thought he was showing a fairly low threshold for this annoyance. Yes I would sometimes get weird random spam comments, most of which were harmless, some of which were in languages I could not read, and a small number of which were actually alarming. (In the latter category, I have twice gotten a spam comment where the person just wrote I WANT TO DIE and repeated it about a hundred times.)

In the past month, though, I have started to understand why someone might do this.

About every 12 hours, I get about a dozen notifications in my email about comments left on my post by someone who goes by the blogger name Jasmine Spyer. (And what a handle for a person who is, in a manner of speaking, spying on you.) 

They are usually something like this:

"Google is now paying $300 to $500 per hour for doing work online work from home. Last paycheck of me said that $20537 from this easy and simple job. Its amazing and earns are awesome. No boss, full time freedom and earnings are in front of you. This job is just awesome. Every person can makes income online with google easily…."

In fact, they may all be exactly that. I don't read them because I know they will be nothing I care about.

The thing that's annoying me is that I am not just some random name this person has come across once, left some garbage and then moved on. No, I am being specifically targeted by this albeit harmless messaging, though I'm sure I am not the only one. (If I were the only one, well, I guess that would either be creepy, or make me wonder what it is about my little movie blog that has attracted this person's attention.)

For a while I was deleting them, but then I stopped. I can't be bothered. 

I shouldn't give this person the time of day by writing a blog post about them, but I'm doing so for the following reasons:

1) To see if this person notices that the post they are commenting on is actually about them. 

2) To see if this decreases the spam this person puts on my blog (unlikely).

3) To see if this increases the spam this person puts on my blog (a lot more likely).

I suppose I have turning off comments available to me as a nuclear option, but I don't really want to use that option. Yes the majority of the comments I receive are spam. But even since the last spate of Jasmine Spyer comments I got last night, I got one bit of genuine engagement with a post I wrote way back in 2015. It's this sort of thing that reminds me that all my writing, all 3,650 posts, are still out there on the internet, for anyone to find any comment on, any number of years later. When they do find it, I want them to be able to make those comments.

So in the short run, I'll wage this war with Jasmine Spyer and see where it goes.