Member insane-topics is not trustworthy
 

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I recently posted a thread in the Service Request forums.

I received many PM's about the job and payment. After careful consideration, I chose insane-topics. The original payment was for $500.00 to perform the upgrade of my custom CMS. After I chose this coder, I re-reviewed my requirements documentation and felt as if I was under paying for this job, since the level of work was rather quite high. I then upgraded the payment to $ 800 and expressed this to insane-topics.

He stated that he, like many other coders/developers, that he would like half of the money upfront. I know that this is common practice and had no problem paying half. It was a lot of money!

This was on January 30, 2006.

I pointed out to him that I needed this done fast as possible, this PM from him on that same day:

I expressed to him that I was not someone who hounded the developers that performed work for me, I just would like current status or updates on his project. He asked me how when did I need this by, I stated this middle of this month, the 14th, he said it would be done WAY prior to that. We spent almost an hour on the phone discussing the requirement document.

From that day he will not respond to my emails, phone calls, and stays offline. This is after I paid him. I have tried to call him at least 20 times (I was already angry) and sent at least 5 emails a day. Now lets understand that if he had a valid excuse, I would not have a problem extending the deadline. Also I know that it is not the 14th of the month and that I am posting this early, but I wanted to let everyone out there know that they need to watch out for this so-called coder/developer. He should have been done by now, even though he is still within the deadline, but he should respond to my emails or phone calls

Some of you will think I am crazy for posting this long thread and that maybe something happened to him that is why he is not contacting you. For one, I know that he is on dialup, so when I call the line is busy, and sometimes it just rings. This tells me that he is there and online

I just want all of the vbulletin community to know about insane-topics and his work ethic. I know that there is no way for me to recover my money from paypal because it is classified as an non-physical good. He has left me without the option to upgrade to 3.5.* and the other half of the $ 800.00

In closing, just remember who this guy is and boycott all his work and defiantly do not higher him to perform any work for your site

Regards,
Mike Simonds
Sportsrant.com
http://www.sportsrant.com

You should've said "I'll send you money as you progress".

I hope someone rips him or her off for twice as much.

Yes I should have but some of the other coders here on vb.org, such as Natch and Dark_Wizard have always been honest and trustworthy, it made me feel as if all the people in the vb community were the same. I felt that we all had honesty and integrity, but guess what, then you meet some jerk off such as insane-topics

I have also updated my post too show everyone

to get around the non-physical goods clause of paypal make the coder burn it to a cd/dvd and for product there is the physical goods ;)
that sux hardcore tho i wish u the best of luck

Now that is one hell of an idea, I cannot believe i did not think of that, I will do this from now on!!! :devious: :disappointed:

Well i feel you're a bit premature in posting this. Afterall his deadline is still a few days away.

Would have been better if you had waited until after the deadline.

PS You might want to chnge your post/title before someone sue you for slander.

yes, he is, but the lack of communication can raise concerns.

Can, might, maybe........

He might be right, or he might be wrong.

Fact:
- He agreed on a coding project
- He agreed on a deadline
- Deadline is not reached yet (hence no way to tell if coder will deliver or not)
- "All" that is wrong until now is that the coder didn't communicate as client expected.

A litle small base to call someone a thief i would say. Wouldn't hold 2 minutes in a court.

I agree with MarcoH64 there. I think you might want to take into account the fact that he is on dial up, if is keeping to his deadline there should be no problems with the project other than the lack of communication on his part. Out of interest are you within the same time zone this can often cause problems when doing jobs over the web.

In short I wouldn?t start worrying yet msimonds :)

Thanks,
Mat

They've approved calling a member a liar and a theif without any evidence yet ? I find that hard to believe.

Never on any job I have done.
Payment is made when the job is done.

I would give the person till the time agreed on, but there should be daily / bi-daily contact on a large project with such a short timeframe.

Good luck on your project.

The fact of the matter is that I have TRIED to contact him and the LACK of communication is what he agreed upon,

Why has he not responded to ANY of my 30 or so emails
Why is he not on IM anymore
IF his phone is busy and he is ONLINE, then why wont he contact me
HE said that he would be done in a few days, the deadline is something that I chose for him, but again, he said it would be a few days

He stated this on the 30 of Jan, so + a few days, is around the 3rd of Feb

THAT IS WHY I HAVE THE CONCERN

You're correct, I changed the title

I'm so sorry that my lack of time has caused this to happen for you mate:

I want to vouch for msimonds as an excellent client: for over 12 months I was working for him on his vB projects, and he was always more than reasonable in terms, conditions, payment, project descriptions, etc. We have spent hours on VoIP, Skype, IM and email communicating, and there is no way that you could lose a way to communicate with him if you tried, so I would be leaning twards his side of this argument, and would back him to the hilt.

The only reason why he had to advertise for a coder is because I became unavailable to continue in the development of the project we were working on; the custom CMS is something that I and Dark_Wizard have built, but it is not yet vB 3.5 ready as DW and I have too many other projects on the go to draw out msimonds - so he needed someone to continue some complicated work, and for a very active site as well.

I really hope things get resolved with this guy, that he either returns the money or gets it done - bad outcome so far mate. I hope he hasn't taken off with the code as well, if he is unreliable I would be very sh*@#y if he had also taken off with that code.

Good luck again,

Natch I apprecaite it man and you have not done anything wrong, You're an honest man and so is DW. I hope that all I am doing here is blowing off steam and actually get to sincerely apologize for my statement.

Today I ACUTALLY got through and spoke to his wife/girlfriend and expressed who I was, why I was calling, and left my number so he could call me back, or email me, or send a carrier pigion for christ sake

Right now his number is busy, meaning that he is online and not responding to my email

I never thought about him actually getting his hands on that code, that would be a shame if he did something with it

Again I hope that I am wrong and thanks Natch for the backup


except
Does that mean that I am a bother and a pain in the ass, LOL!!! :mad:

I personally think you have jumped the gun somewhat, despite he may not have been in comunication as you expected, what are you going to do if he says its done and shows you it working but doesnt deliver and asks something like "but what are we going to do about your slander of me on vb.org ?".

By making premature claims like this publicly you have left yourself wide open to a settlement demand that could be well over the initial agreed price.

I think now you had better hope he doesnt deliver. You only had to wait 6 days before the claim would have had validity.

Paid web coders/installers who dont deliver obviously reflect on the others who are also in the field, but wild and premature accusations from clients do nothing to help it either.

I think even vb.org could be held somewhat liable aswell by permitting the thread to remain visible for such a length of time when it is a premature claim.

Not any more liable then this transaction beginning here. In others words, no liability.

A very important aspect in any customer/Vendor transaction is communication. If none is present then theres a lack of transaction.

There is a big difference between allowing members to make public service requests which are then arranged privately and permitting publicly veiwable posts that are prematurely slandering one transaction party.

Yes i do not disagree that a lack of comunication is wrong, just as is over communication.

There are aspects in the first post that is far from correct.

One of those is where the complainee states "sometimes the phone is busy sometimes it just rings, telling him the other party is at the place where the phone is". Wrong does not allways work like that.
Lets say I was calling some one and during that attempt some one else tried to also contact the same person by phone, yep they would get a busy signal on many networks. therefore this is no indication whoever is in while your getting mixed signals. Do not assume what is not fact.

The facts as we know are

Theres a lack of comunication between the parties on one side during the time set.
Theres a publicly premature slanderous post.
And a website has permitted the premature slander to remain published.

Pretty easy to see there which ones would get the benefit in a full legal dispute imo.

I know where I would be going if that was being done against myself.

First I would prove the slander in a law suit in the first instance giving excellent grounds for a suit against the publishing website, regardless of any disclaimers about posts are members veiws only.

Such as newspapers etc do not have such disclaimers ie "the views expressed in our articles are the veiw of the journalist not the newspaper" because in court as a publisher they are responsible, the disclaimer would not hold water any more than a coulander.

Yeah and let me know about the class action you are probably working on for someone not warning you that coffee is served hot. :rolleyes:

Goodluck finding a lawyer or a court to handle your case.. There is no slander in his post. He stated the facts from his end without name calling.


Also you should be familiar with the above TOS that all member here agreed to. ;)

I'll say that lack of communication isn't always a good sign, and I can understand why your abit angry at the moment. Though you never know what can be going on, on his end. I agree with Marco. If he doesn't deliver on the 14th as expected, then you have all the right in the world to let it be known to the vBulletin community, though you also never know; you can get an email from him at 11:59 on the 13th with all the files, ect... ;)

Your anaology to some other pathetic case of which I have no involvement in where as you have suggested I may have is riduclous.

With regards the TOS quote, as vb.org staff have allready participated in the thread, means it is without doubt the subject has been reviewed by them, therefore it only leaves a question in civil law as to wether the post itself is objectionable and the disclaimer is good enough in the sense to counter a continued publication of a possible prematurely slanderous post and is therefore an objectionable post.

As the TOS states they will endevour to remove objectionable posts by members, and the fact that they have participated in the thread and left it open to public veiwing and response, thereby possibly failing to act as per their own TOS impo has left them wide open to a contraversal and potentially succesful suit.

The TOS in this instance has not been adhered to, wether that be how civil law would see it is another story. How ever from what I see all that needs to be done here is prove the post is slanderous and therefore objectionable, the rest is par for the course.

I asked and yet have not been met with a proof of slander. Your posts so far have been riduclous so I responded with such. Maybe there is something wrong with your eyes because you did not read the TOS. It is quite simple.
Again there are two different statements being made there. To break it down for you.

1. It is impossible for every post to be reviewed.
2. All messages express the views of the Author and all liability (responsibility) is on parties involved not staff ect.


I think you should probably stick with your day job as being an internet lawyer is not your calling. You agreed to the TOS and now all liability on behalf of staff and above mentioned parties is relinquished ad infinitum. Burden of proof is a pita, especially in a Liberal court in UK.

Good luck though.....really. :rolleyes:

Staff has replied, and urged the thread starter to reconsider his wordings, and the threadstarter followed up on that.

There are some important differences when compairing vb.org with a newspaper. A newspaper is actively printing the articles, meaning they review and choose what is printed. vB.org however (like most boards, unless with full moderation) is not publicating the message, the poster is. We can only review afterwards.

Wrong again. We have requested to change the wording to what we think is an acceptable level (yes you can argue about that). We are no judges, and we can not judge of this still is slander or not. If the coder decides to start a lawsuite and the judge say it is not allowed, then we will have to remove it.

If we don't remove it with a courtorder, then we would be liable.

insane-topics == insanctus

At least, I always thought that this was the case? I seem to remember a thread being posted months ago about it.. This all sounds very similar to the type of thing that we had happening a couple of years ago anyway.

Sorry to hear about your bad experience this time..

Nitro and others you are forgetting one small item during this time of development

He, insane-topics, as the developer is supposed to deliver the final product by the deadline, FULLY tested. How is he going to know if it is fully tested by the date. He has no way of knowing that it is functioning properly. This is not just some off the shelf CMS such as VBadvanced that has tons of support. How am I supposed to know if he is going to deliver a 100 %.

During development the coder or responsible party usually delivers software packages in stages for testing or at least something to look at to make sure that I am happy with the results and that it is working as it did or designed.

So if he delivers the software package at 11:59 with all the files, how am I supposed to know if this works, I could be the developer and send you a zip file saying that work is 100% complete, would you trust me if I said it was complete. Here it is the 11th of Feb, 72 hours away from the deadline and I have SEEN NOTHING to show any sort of change on my development site

So for those of you who say that I am jumping the gun here and posting prematurely need to come to a reality and really read into this. This is not some small hack that I am asking for, this is a much more involved system that cannot just go live into a production environment when the developer says so. It needs testing and I am supposed to go live by the agreed date. Unless I am seeing something wrong with my statement then I feel that I am NOT premature in my posting. Natch and DW always sent me updates, telling or asking me if this works on my end as I wanted it designed, not how they felt it was supposed to work, that my friends is called work ethic, something that insane-topics does not have.

Once again, he did not return my phone call, did not answer any of my emails and has not been on line since the agreement has been met.

I did change my thread title, it was a little harsh. Do I still feel as if i slandered him in anyway, NO. If I am wrong, where is the developer to tell his side of the story. Or even better why has he not responded to paypal to tell his side of the story since i disputed the payment (not that I will get it back), but he is close to that cutoff date and still has not responded

Its funny how you developers come to the aid of others. If you know that you have good work ethic, do not post here to tell me that all of you have the same ethics. I do not feel as if I was supposed to warn you as I felt to the other "clients" here at vb.org and the vbulletin community. I feel ripped off and I have every right to post a warning to others about this so called developer

Regards,
Mike Simonds
Sportsrant.com

Not to jack this thread, but I find the whole thing quite interesting. I posted a thread here sometime back with a warning for the community regarding a rather large commercial skin site employing, as senior staff, an individual who owns and runs a rather large warez site with massive amounts of ripped stuff from all spectrums of the forum world and beyond...even stuff from here (but not the skin site he works for :=\). I confronted this individual one night on the site he works at, presented the evidence and was immediately pounced by him and the other mods there. He had the nerve to say his warez activities were a "hobby". Of course the thread there was deleted and I was banned. So I came here to tell the story. I had screenshot evidence and still the thread here was deleted rather quickly, for what I remember to be "flaming". Could it also be because that one of the "legit" staff members of this skin site who participated in the attack on me is also a member here with coder status? This member knows of these activities and apparently condones them. I know moderating a forum this large is problematic, but it seems that claims should be given a proper review before a) allowing them to run or b) deleting them.

I won't name names or sites as I don't want to go down that road again here.

Thanks and again, sorry for the interuption.

Coders do not have the ability to delete threads.

I didn't say they did, but some here have influence. I'm not saying that is the reason, but the comparison between this thread and mine is stark imho. Perhaps I should have reworded that part because I don't want to make accusations that I can't prove.

Adding my $0.02 here (and briefly too at that!).....

As has been said again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again (get the picture?)

Don't pay before the job has been done, tested, and fixed. Most coders work by this rule. Some do ask for something up front, but I'd be wary at more than 10%.

I've experienced this on both sides of the coin. I've been ripped off for $200 by someone doing a job for me when I first started out, I've completed a full job for someone who never paid me ($500), I've sent a 50% status report for someone who was due to pay me 50% at that point who I never heard from again ($400), I've had coders and clients suddenly stop communicating with me after agreeing a job.

And with contacting, even though I have clients worldwide so timezones are always a pain, I answer my phone or my cell whenever it rings day or night, and if there is an urgent problem I deal with it right away.

You've possibly been ripped off. There's not a thing you can do about it. Go and punch a pillow while screaming, then come back chilled out and learn from it.

Mike,
He got me too!

1-25-06 - I made an agreement via email, from an ad I placed in the Vbulletin.org forums, for this person to do some custom web programming for me. He quoted me $150. I paid 1/2 down with this transaction in good faith. The timeframe agreed upon in the deal was 1 week. 2 days go by and I got a PM on the forums that said he was progressing well. 3 days later no updates from him so I start PMing and Emailing him for status. A couple days later ( 2-4-06), I get an email stating that his PC was messed up and he should have something in a couple days. I have not heard back since then. On 2-6-06, I sent an email stating that this has been long enough, and if I didn't here back soon, I would be reporting him and finding a new programmer. No response. 2-9-06, I sent an email stating that he had 24 hours to refund my $75 paypal payment or I would continue with the report to vbulletin.org and paypal. Today is 2-11-06 and I am moving foward. I request a reversal of charges.

I posted the above reply and like many, I didn't read the thread prior to posting. Now I have read the thread, I can not believe the grief given to Mike about this. Of course, I sympathize with him since the same guy got me too.

I have filed with Paypal and have a letter drafted ready to send to his local authorities when I find the info.

Duh and what higher you!!!


Now I am learing that he also screwed another member here

Now this has to suck, I had been thinking that he had done this in the past to others, but not to someone who I actually knew. If you want to team up on this, let me know man

This is funny Chris, I FINALLY got an email from him after I did not stop bugging his wife/girlfriend on the phone (talked to her 3 times and he is always gone)

Quote:

Originally Posted by insane-topics had a pc issue that messed up my connection and half of my files, so far the CMS is all done. And ported over the work I had done on the gallery got lost in the mix, so I have to redo it.

I like the highlighted statement, his own firewall was ALL OF a sudden, blocking his outgoing emails and you would think that he would come up with another excuse for other clients, or should i say victims

Why would you trust a coder with only one hack here and no proven work elsewere? Personally, if I was to ever employ somebody for custom work I would only accept either an advanced/master coder or somebody that has a lot of previous satisfied clients like eg cinq. Insane-topics has neither of these... You can't even prove that he has the coding abilities to accomplish such a thing!

This is the email I got from him Feb 2, 2006 at 5PM

Well Michelle, My project was not $800 as mike's was, but I have enlisted the help of Logician and someone else here with no hitches, so unfortunately, I was trusting him based on a community.

I went with Cinq over some other hackers for a paid job awhile back for that exact reason, and he was flawless.

Yeah, that's why I mentioned him, cause I have heard a lot of good things about him :)

After HE finally contacted me again last night, he said that he would have my CMS ready for testing on my dev site when I awoke. I know that was not going to happen becuase I had not given him the access to that site. First thing this morning, I sent him the login and passwords that he needed to show me what he has. I sent him 3 emails today and guess what, NOTHING

Now that there is more proof than ever with cleck673 also showing that this guy is a fraud, please ALL MEMBERS OF THE VBULLETIN COMMUNITY THAT NEED PRIVATE WORK DONE

Actually, no. I'm too busy at the moment to take on any new clients.

Always check out bidding coders before hiring though. Ask for references, links to work, search here looking for comments about their work. If in doubt, don't hire them.

I can't remember which one of my past clients exactly,but i had to help one out after this same mentioned member took his money and never got back to him again. So you folks aren't the first,most definitely. Real sad that some resort to this....

For the record,I always request for 50% partial payment in the form of a deposit upfront and i make it very clear to the client that if he/she is not comfortable with it,feel free to look for other developers.All my clients can atest to this.

And thanks for the vote of confidence to the few who brought up my name. A pity I didnt reply to your Service Request sooner, Mike.:(

Unless he has disappeared or become another person, LOGICIAN is a stand up guy as well. I can attest to CINQ, I have hear nothing but good.

Yeah but you asking for money upfront with you history is fine but this guy is a joke.... Can we say ban?

If it really is that "Insanctus" person as mentioned earlier, and if I remember correctly.. he has been banned.

A couple of times?

If it is Insanctus yet again, what a joke.. I feel sorry for the people who get suckered into these things.. I never ask for money until after my job is finished.

It sucks that way, but atleast I do get paid, and the client ends up happy too.

Getting paid up front is just kind of.. asking for this to happen, IMO. He doesn't have the drive and motivation to work for $400 when he just got $400 for doing absolutely nothing..

If he had to work for the full $800, then I would imagine the job would have been done by now.