yeah.. that true...

A seperate user profile field just for paid work would be nice, like reputation but you can only give it in the paid hacks forum or something.

[high]* Borgs8472 would give positive feedback to Polo :)[/high]

Well, we also have to be careful because not all customers are honest either.... One person that isn't happy about something that you had no control over can tarnish your whole record...

Lets not go overboard here.

No offense but if you are going to pay someone who will provide no information at all and has no refrences and has only a few posts here....... you are asking to get ripped off....

Buyer Beware......

the only serious thing that someone can handle with this problem is to build a commercial website like anyother freelancer website, where contracts are given with a lot of security , but the content is not a single way related to the main project itself...

vb.org have no way to control the members here, because it's an open community. each time someone steal a member, all the community suffer... imagine if a coder think he can make trouble by complaining about the rating he receive... flaming will be all around...

external and controled environment is the best... there is already some freelancers websites that offer project calls for vBulletin boards... they are supported by the security system, and payement systems like Escrow....

btw, we already tryed the rating discussion... last winter we had to "ban" someone, and we had a load of discussions, and abandonned a lot of ideas... and btw, the person stopped his activities, and hide now...

Bad people will be bad people! Such a system won't really help much, and it will probably turn away the new coders from handling requests, because compared to everyone else, they will have the same credibility as them evil folks on new accounts.

Just look into the person you're doing business with, searching by posts is pretty useful if you are the buyer.