I am sorry this happened to you. I also believe if a member rips another member here he shall be banned.

Sorry but there are courts for that.

We don't have the ability the police has for checking up on facts, nor have we the right to judge someone.

i sent you an email from you contact form on your site, read it my friend

Mike

This does make sense; the pattern is very similar... insanctus was not only untrustworthy, but had a magical firewall that was very handy in blocking emails when required (IIRC).

This all point towards needing to have a system of being able to track old usernames to new user accounts aka eBay, as well as the mysticall referrals system.

Once again, bad karma Mike; I hope you have changed the locks on the site, and sent legal letters demanding al work completed so far, and that he destroy any and all copies of cde, etc etc legal threatenings; Also notify PayPal of this action.

I have done this Natch and damn I wish you were available, I KNOW that the job would get done

I have requested that cinq contact me asap

To all who have been reading this post! I talked over the weekend to insane-topic's wife about the entire situation. He actually tried to work on the site and get something accomplished but I asked him to stop ASAP. My reasons were:

I do not trust his coding, being implemented to fast without testing
I do not trust his work ethic and his dishonesty
I decided to take the loss on the money and persue another developer


If anyone is wanting to look at the document, I will post another request in the service request forum

Thanks for all the postive posts and sorry to anyone if I upset them, I still believe that anyone requesting work here, do not higher insane-topics

Regards
Mike Simonds
Sportsrant.com


I forgot to add this about his attempt to get the CMS implemented on my site and the reason that I fired him. He told me in an email and his wife told me also that he was 100% done with the CMS and that all that needed to be done is the gallery. Well if he was done, All that needed to be done is the new scripts would need to replace the old ones and template changes needed, etc... well there is no way that he was done 100%, becuase his updates came in patches and I received about 90 or so database error messages. There is no way that he was even near done, I fired him and I am moving on

this is now open again: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=107868

Well sorry to hear the end result for you msimonds :( I hope you get refunded without to much issue.

Personally I would have smelt a rat if someone was quoting too little for a job such as a complete custom cms and I find $800 very low and a promise of completion and full 100% live tested inside 5-6 weeks as highly unlikely, but then I do not know how big this cms project was/is.

When paying in advance what ever the % you really need to be knowing in advance some kind of reputation of the person your intending on having undertake the task. Its not an unheard of practice for some advance payments as the shoe can be on the other foot just as much. The % you pay up front should be relative to the job size, the larger the job the smaller the % as extra topups of advances can be made as progression is made.

Thanks nitro I appreciate it. It was my fault for paying that much upfront. I was just angry and I need to move on. We all learn from our mistakes and I shall. The CMS is already done, it just needs to be ported over so it can work with 3.5.*. I will not see any of the money back from him, his wife said that she already spent the money

She expressed that her family lives on welfare, that they do not have long distance and that she would be willing to setup a payment plan over a time period or 12-18 months

It would cost more to go after him on a legal level, hiring lawyers and such

I do believe that he should be banned for his activities. I understand that the staff here cannot be a judge but there is indisputable proof that he did, not only to me, but to another vbulletin paying member. As customers, we should be protected from person(s) such as insane-topics

Just an update, I actually forgot that when I made the payment to insane-idiot via paypal that I chose 260.00 of it to go onto my visa check card... so Paypal would not do anything, as expected, but the Rep there told me to contact visa and fight the charge

I did and the money was returned to me

What to do if insane-topics has the Ba||$ to return to release hacks, anyone going to help me out

Report him to the administrators, maybe they'll do something such as putting him in another usergroup where the 'Service Requests' forum is invisisble to him.

That would be great but they cannot be a judge or take sides and I totally understand that....

You know what is really funny? I actually sent insane-topics this direct link, kind of funny that he did not respond to it or defend himself :rolleyes:

WONDER WHY :paranoid:

If we go around banning everyone that gets reported for doing this we'll start seeing such threads more often I think. What happens when one of these threads are posted and a respected coder is the one begin called a thief?

The burden of proof is with you guys, and a couple of copy/pasted e-mail exchanges or saying x person screwed me out of x amount of money doesn't prove if this happened the way you said it did. Anything you can show me to prove what you're saying could have been altered...

I'm not calling you a liar, this is just the way things are...

This is why it's important that you do extensive research on a person before you decide to hire them for any type of service. Get references, see what they have released here, and see if they give good support inside of their hack threads and in the support forums. Remember if something smells fishy, odds are it is.

I'm glad to hear you got your money back, good luck finding someone reliable to get this job done for you.

I've always wondered why reputation wasn't enabled on .org. I think it could be useful for people trying to determine if they should hire a coder for custom work, especially if said coder has scammed others in the past.

msimonds, I hope you get everything resolved. :)

You know trader ratings work very well on hardware sites. Maybe it's time to implement a system like that here.
I find it interesting that this person has not stopped in to clear up the confusion or at least to offer his side of the story.

First, it's libel when printed, slander when spoken.

This was blown out of proportion. The guy is stating his side of the story, the other guy has his right to respond. Also, calling someone by username a 'thief', I believe, cannot be held as libel.

Good luck to you!

The problem is, if like you say he is on "dial-up", there is no way he can be banned from here unless they ban his whole ISP which vB.org will not do because they could be banning a load of other members at the same time who use his ISP.

And even if they banned his IP used now, he can just create a new name with a fresh IP. Which he probably does anyway when he rips somebody off like this. I just wish there was something in place here to stop this kind of thing happening.

And I think the "REP" thing is a great idea and a step forward in the right direction to avoid this kind of thing, were people can choose a coder taking there rep into concideration.

i still think that it is funny that some people, while not directly, took his side or backed him, but that he never signed on to defend himself. Even after I sent him the direct thread link

If you are talking about standard vB Reputation, then this is not really usefull. Reputation is based on reputation points received for a post, not for work you have done or how trustworthy you are.


I don't think anybody backed him up or took his side. Some have been trying to keep a neutral perspective on things maybe, but not really choose his side.

No I didn't mean the default rep system, I was meaning some kind of modded rep system were when a person pays a person to create a hack for them, they can rate there service. Something along them lines. Used only for that.

Obviously it would have to be a new hack created that displays this against there name in public view. No idea though were you would even start to create something like that, without other users being able to spoil a good rep by posting bogus bad rep votes for a persons service.

All issues had been resolved I found no reason to come to vb.org. I thought the good staff would prevent such a thread from going so far.

At any rate the issue has been resolved, as stated I had computer problems. Oddly enough these days windows actually has a high rate of virus’s bugs that cause someone to reformat, and hardware does not last for ever.

I had been asked to stop work as he stated and all matters dropped per agreement.

I consider this matter closed and shall make no further posts upon it.

It has been suggested and discussed before, but the outcome for any proposal was always that there where also too many downsides to it.

My money was refunded via Paypal. That's all I am going to say as well.

Actually this is not resolved. I was able to get some of my money back from paypal because I paid paypal with my Visa, You still stole $ 400.00 from me and that is a fact. I asked you to stop becuase you lied to me about the status of the project and said you were done as did your wife. When you started the work, you stated that it was all done and that all you had to do is upload the files, it was clear that was not the case as all i saw was errors and you kept emailing me about corrections.

The fact is you messed up that development board so bad that I had to delete it all and start again from scratch for a new, trustworthy, developer. The fact is you were fired and you still owe me $ 130.00, even $ 400 as we have an open dispute on yahoo, that is the fact!!

I cannot wait to see your reply, if at all you have one! :angry: