enough is enough....people get ripped off!!
 

Ok enough is enough something needs to be done about the way the looking to hire section works


i have been ripped off 3 times myself here and lost over $600


yesterday someone else also got ripped off - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=176163


What are you going todo about this vBulletin staff???

logic

Well, in the forum description, it clearly says:
Instead of saying "what are you going to do" how about suggesting what we COULD do.

what about a feedback system that we can go to others profile and check score .
coders can opt in on a usergroup where they get feedback by buyers.
buyers opt in on a usergroup where they get feedback by coders.

when buyer post a job he can click some where to give job to a coder that accept job then he can leave feedback to coder and coder can leave feedback to buyer.

vbulletin staff do not run this site. Its run by volunteers, and at the moment we simply do not have time to write a custom feedback system.

Please refer to this information on member feedback ;

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=136844

To anyone interested in hiring a coder from here, why not just ask for some references from here. I'm sure the legitimacy of the accounts could be somewhat verified rather easily... at least to some degree.

Hello.
Be careful with the user "SmileyR"
Read here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=176163

--------------- Added [DATE]1213274407[/DATE] at [TIME]1213274407[/TIME] ---------------

Hello:
eBay and other auction systems do very well with user reputation and comments.

That has been suggested plenty of times - please see Paul's reply.

Personally, I think the forum should be closed until a feedback system is made. I would of thought that you would ban the people who do this -- seems you don't. This will just lose you regular members, and without the regular members, this site would be NOTHING!

Why don't you use iTrader?

I think that a good suggestion is to have a feedback forum with the same general settings as exist in Paid Services. Each member can create their own thread to which only they can reply. The current sticky in Paid Services tells members to "do their homework" but it would be much easier for this to occur if there was a single location that the sticky could point towards. A simple search of a member's name would quickly determine whether or not they have a long history of deceit. (It would certainly hinder serial scammers.)

read this, been there, done ...nothing.

read the stickies before posting... search the user profile before accepting a contract... i've seen a lot of ripped of members complaint about someone who had 3 or 5 posts on this forum with no release... they say "YES" to anything... their fault.

when you go buy a car, you go to your closest darkest place where they sell cars without any company name, or you start shopping at Ford, Chrysler and so on?!... if you are not able to shop for a coder, it's all your fault, there is a ton of comments on these forums about scammers...

Folks, I have been writing code since most of you were a twinkle in your grandfather's eye ('77)

I have done hundreds of contracts, some free lance and others with firms. I too have been ripped off, not paid, given bad paychecks at xmas, the works. Two way street.

As with any thing, buyer beware. I never pay for it all up front, I ask for phases, and I only remit once I am satisfied my idea's are being represented in the code.

Given that I am an old dinosaur mainframe assembler guy, they have me managing two seperate staffs these days. These peeps are in India and Malaysia, and my fat arse is in America. These peeps are paid to follow specs and write code, build systems, etc. That's even a challenege, and I KNOW THESE GUYS- I go see them for a month twice a year! :D

My point here is to think thru what you want, and then how to break it into chunks and order the payment according to result. NEVER PAY all the coin up front - A retainer is fine, but it should not be more than 10% of the bid in any case.

Also, avoid an hourly rate, unless you really like tossing coin out the winder. Request a Fixed bid, and if it takes some time to find the right person.. be patient

77? I have socks older than that. ;)

You notice I Didn't say "Which" century :D - I was there..with Hollerith :p

Any how, just remember, we are only as gullable as we allow ourselves to be. When we realize we been taken, we get all sorts of pissed off. Hindsight'll do that to a fellow...

Cheers, all

I wondered where that smell in here was coming from :eek: Bob, I deleted your PM by accident..can you resend it?

--Resume rant about being ripped off--

I feel like we just had this discussion. :D


The users on my site do trading a lot and you have good trader and bad traders. So, we have a Good & Bad Traders forum and ask that users start a thread using the format of "Good Trader: Username" or "Bad Trader: Username". If someone starts one of those threads about someone, we ask that they give some details or why they rate them Good or Bad. It works pretty well and is easily searchable.

I agree, it's high time there was a user feedback system here. I'm proud to say I've only ever had one dispute out of dozens of clients, and that's when he refused to pay me for the work that I did. Reward those who do good work, and disgrace those who do bad work.

the only problem i see with the actual situation is that the actions taken against scammers are always private... the guy can continue to scam outside the site, nobody will know... i've seen that lately... someone is posting a paid request, and a scammer who re-registered with a new username is answering the request via the email provided by the client... it's outside vb.org because there is no pm, no discussion online regarding the proposal...

having a note like "this user was banned because of scam", or anything, would be just enough so everybody know that he was tagged... i can say that 90% of the freelancer sites are doing it... don't know why vb.org would not be able to provide this... it is not because of privacy statement... but what privacy if someone can rip others via a false account...

the only way someone could be verified as a real person and not a scammer with multiple personalities is to permit the entire access to the paid request forum only to valid license owners... the guys can then track who this person is from their own clients database, and lock their access to the forum if they are tagged as scammer... multiple-personalities could not avoid this restriction because you can always be verified to check your situation...

anyway, this was suggested for the last 4 years i'm here, nothing was done, i suppose it's useless to start over again... even Paul is right,.. they do not have time to code such a verification system or anything...

a feedback / rating system can be abused - it will only create new problems

the best form of promotion (or selling your services)...
is to act appropriate (whenever posting), release great products, write great articles, and offer support.

your actions dictate:
- Who you are.
- What type of person you are.
- How good you work with others.

once you start doing this employers/buyers will start contacting you

TIP:
Large employers are often lurking in these forums - looking for qualified personnel. The actions you take here can make a difference in your life. By standing out, you will start getting offers too good to pass.

Princeton, this is a good demonstration of job ads, but you forget something... nobody here can provide a portfolio or curriculum in their profile... if you think it's a good place to promote ourselves, why don't you add some userfields to let the guys list their capabilities ?!

The person who hires should be able to Keep Note on the users Profile....about the work..as feedback..so the one who hire can go to the person's profile and read it..

that will be easy to count on people before they get ripped off easily...

A feedback system is exactly what is needed, i cant believe it hasn't already been integrated tbh.

Escrow?

You are totally missing the point of the thread poster. It's the coders that are the problem in this instance. I have no problems getting work, and I'm sure most of the experienced coders around here are the same, as you point out. Good coders tend to attract good buyers, so I don't have the problem with them either.

The problem is with the bad apples within the community. Yes, a feedback system can be abused with inaccurate feedback placed, but you have the same thing on ebay and amazon marketplace. Why not make such a feedback system opt-in. Bad coders would soon disable it and have no feedback on which to base their experience, and good coders can disable it if they feel it's being abused for whatever reason. I think it's also important to do as ebay does and let the person to reply to feedback they recieve, but only once.

Folk, I have a prortfolio of efforts I have built over the years. As the admin said. DO great work, write GREAT articles and DOCUMENTATION that is better than your mods, and you can't help but do well. I can substantiate any skill I wish to sell to a prospective client. But there is one thing I will not do, and that is sell them something I KNOW I can't do with a professional level of quality.

I work for a large outsourcer, and I train two teams folks overseas to be mainframe systems engineers (yea, go ahead, laugh at the dinosaur :) ) . The quote above is very similar to their objectives in their job descriptions. And I insist they have the best customer service and integrity attributes possible.

So, heed that fella, he speaks with straightened tounge :up:

I use Guru.com with excellent results! 10/10
here in vB.org 0/6 :(

I guess vb.org and guru.com are made with two different purpose...vbulletin is only a support site .....and for paid req section it have clear rules...people dont read them....instead of it vbulletin should apply simple feedback from each hiring persons...about the person they pickk..

Ok this is just wrong. Not IF the Rating system tracks the IP of the person who left the rating.

Then you can find them in the ACP and basically investigate the issue.

Users under 25 posts here should be fully excluded from rating and even using Paid Requests Services section, shouldn't even be able to view it, that's how people get scammed and how people rip people off.

Saying the ratings can be abused is kind of off as well, considering that the Mods/Add ons here are rated by hundreds/thousands of members, and they generally are 4 to 5 star. So one bad rating, is not going to affect a great coder.

EDIT - put the rating system on the users profiles page. It can be done in 5 minutes. It's called, they don't want to do it, that is the issue.

I can understand why they wouldn't want to create a rating system. However, I think that a feedback forum is more than reasonable. Especially when you consider that their solution right now is to promote user's to "update" their service request thread with their feedback of a coder.

It makes sense to have a separate forum for feedback to make it more transparent to new buyers where they ought to investigate the reputation of coders.

Such a solution would be easier, rather than more difficult to moderate. Afterall, it is easier to monitor user feedback when it is in a feedback forum than when it is randomly scattered about in the paid-service request forum.

That's fine. Just have the threads be the very User Name of the Coder

like

Attilitus

Psionic Vision

Boofo

and let user's reply to there threads with feedback, and use the Thread Rating System as a rating of the coder.

If someone gets a reply from someone they didn't work with, they contact the mod of that forum and state, I did not do work for this client, etc. Please remove there post and rating if possible.

Again, if Thread Rating, or Coder Rating gets abused on this site, then so are the Ratings for every hack that has been on this site for the past X years.

Since I don't code for hire, that doesn't apply to me as I don't want to get a bad rep from someone who might be undesirable to work for in the first place. My rep is bad enough as it is.

And why in the hell am I third on the list?! Let's be using the DESC variable. Discrimination due to age is illegal, you know. :D

Well if you code for free then, it's too bad we're not good acquaintances.

Durr...example. :)

New List

Boofo

Cyb

Paul who? lol

Yeah, I get that alot, lately. I've had to lean how to code while doing the backstroke these past few days. ;)

if you guys think feedback system can be abuse give us a example maybe we can find solutions.
also staff say is too busy to create such hack .what about someone else create it and post it here would you guys use it ?

nah the new vbulletin owners are happy to watch us sit here and get ripped off

Please don't start with such insinuations. vBulletin.org policies are decided on by the vB.org staff. Jelsoft does provide us with assistence in the form of server space etc, but does not make our rules and policies. IB (the new owners you refer to) have nothing to do with how vB.org is operated.

Insinuating that IB "happy to watch us sit here and get ripped off" don't make any sense.

At the end of the day the thing that's stopping the staff here from wanting to do this is because of the disputes that will arise over bad rep. They don't have time to investigate that that is understandable. That is why I suggested making the feedback system opt-in.

...Or just close it until you have a feed-back system. People are just signing up in order to SCAM people. Who says they have to make one? There is iTrader, you know -- what's stopping you use that?

Amen

Closing the forum would remove the ability for members to get the help they need for their forum. As I see it, that is in no way a viable option, and looking at how the administration had handled it, I would say they agree.

in the same way we can tell that opening that forum was one of the big errors here. it caused the coders to wait for people to post in that forum instead of the not-paid requests forum... the coders now do not answer non-paid requests, because they know that the clients will someday post the same request in the paid requests because they need the feature they requested...

someone will say that it is not real... so get to the unpaid requests forum, and see by yourself... 95% of the requests are not even read... and if you can read properly, go to the paid request forum and check who is posting there... same people who have done it in the first place.

the reason why it's a complete mess on this site is that the Paid Request forum was created to answer -- requests... not to become a freelancer registry like on sitepoint.com or freelancers.com ... the goal was not to create a market of coders, so why exploit this to the max now that we have more and more scammers?

it was requested numerous of times that jelsoft support the creation of an external freelancer's site for vBulletin, but they refuse... a good point they have is that we can call for freelancers on sitepoint etc... they do not need to multiply the resources...

so my only suggestion here would be the same i do time after time... close the paid request forums, and open an external freelancer site... no need to be from the guys up there, someone here can do it...

it was done some times, but each time, as the project is started by non-professionals, it is not taken in consideration... always dropped and non-reputed. so the only alternative is simply to drop the paid requests forum... by that, you will stop scammers, and the coders will continue to answer unpaid requests... and have their own place to advertise their services, like right now anyway... most of the good coders i know here have their own portfolio somewhere...