New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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I thought that the drop was due to PPH booting out sellers who had done no work on the site. I repeated some very niche searches I did some time ago and the number of people coming up has reduced drastically, but what seems to have changed is that people with zero CERT and no earnings ever have disappeared. This looks like a good thing to me.
As for the Maven promoters, I am supposed to be persuaded that I should pay a monthly fee to a site because they were honest enough to admit they cannot manage to configure off the shelf software, let alone develop their own? I would rather keep paying my 4% or 5% to PPH - at least they only get it if they provide me with work.
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@Graeme
**what seems to have changed is that people with zero CERT and no earnings ever have disappeared. This looks like a good thing to me**It looks like a good thing to me too – if the reasoning used by PPH has merit (which I’m sceptical of). Zero Cert? Well, that could be anything from not yet having landed a job in the particular niche to being otherwise occupied for a long period of time….. No earnings ever? Same applies. High earnings don’t necessarily imply good work, just good payers. I don’t know what your niche searches retrieved, but I sure hope PPH had a solid selection process in place when removing anyone and didn’t just pull the trigger based on low CERT and/or no earnings.
**I am supposed to be persuaded that I should pay a monthly fee to a site because they were honest enough to admit they cannot manage to configure off the shelf software, let alone develop their own?
**You seem to know an awful lot about the Maven project. Care to share? Most of the folk on here haven’t got a clue as to what to expect, except something new that is constructed by freelancers for freelancers. Yes, we’ve seen what’s out there so far (unfortunately, as it seems that they are being analysed based on what is visible). No one will supposedly persuade you to pay for a service you don’t want, I’m sure; they’re just asking for an open mind and some patience, so don’t heckle against them yet. If the transparency of Maven in terms of communication is kept up, they’ll have some irons in the fire for a lot of us.[Disclaimer: I am not linked to Maven beyond having registered on the site.]
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@ Graeme
I am also quite amused that the people behind Maven have removed their own surnames from their own site! Keeping anonymity on PPH forums I can understand, but being anonymous on your own site is something else
From what I gather the people behind Maven are still active on here, and if any of the ninjas got wind of who they were they would be blocked so I don't blame them for remaining anonymous for the time being. As for the Boonex Dolphin thing I don't even know what that means and if they are struggling with this that tells me that they aren't tech freelancers as I wouldn't have a clue where to start building a website in any shape or form.
The membership levels are £10, £15 and £20. This lets you post 5, 10 or 15 projects (hourlies) and go for as many of the jobs posted on the wanted board as you like. These will all have set prices there will be no bidding at all. Before you ask I know all this as I have signed up and the options are all there on my account lol. When it goes live I going to pay my tenner and see what happens just like everyone else.
Ultimately none of us know what to expect but as I have said previously it is not only the one off fee that appeals it is also being able to open my inbox in the morning without a feeling of dread of what is waiting for me. I don't know you area of expertise Graeme, am presuming its something tech related, but as a humble writer the commission I pay hits hard.
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@Roland, the sensible thing for them to do is to target people who are rarely given jobs and who apply for large numbers of jobs (those buyers are not interested in) or who get consistently low feedback. They would probably lose a few good people, but it would be worth it to get rid of the spammy low end sellers. Of course, how sensible PPH are likely to be is another question.
Everything I know about Maven is publicly available info. A friend and I got interested and discussed it two or three times and each time one or both of us did a Google or a whois search or whatever and it was quite easy to identify the people involved, get a rough idea of what their skills were, etc. I do not want to disclose identities as they are entitled to stay anonymous if they want to.
@Deb, if they are not tech freelancers, should they be running a web site!?
I will wait and see what jobs are offered and then decide whether there are enough to justify a tenner.
I do not enjoy paying commission, but at least I only pay it when i get work.
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@ Graeme, You could say that about most websites tbh. Most of my clients who I work for haven't the foggiest idea of the actual workings of their site but manage them capably as they have learnt as they go how to make adjustments and amendments etc . If everyone could build their own sites from scratch and then run them there wouldn't be all the jobs on here from people wanting sites built.
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PPH have no decided my skills include "Wordpress". This is an interesting one, because I do mention Wordpress in my profile - to explain why I think people should not use it for websites (its OK for blogs and very simple sites - I still use it for my blog).
So I know it, but I hate it and I am unlikely to want to do any Wordpress work on PPH, especially given that there are lots of cheap bidders for simple Wordpress jobs. This is another problem with PPH's algorithms: they do not understand the context in which words are used. If you added "I do not speak Mandarin" to my profile, you would probably start getting selected for Mandarin translation jobs.
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It looks like PPH have introduced live chat on the website. There's a 'Need Help?' button that opens to a chatbox.
Err... yeah. There's also a Feedback button on the RHS of the page. Personally, wouldn't bother using them though.
@Graeme - all they are doing is going through people's profiles picking out keywords, which I believe Paul may have mentioned previously.
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@Malcolm, that seemed to be the problem in the past but I have been selected to bid on two jobs this morning due to my skills in Jewellery Design and Prepress. These words do not appear anywhere on my profile and I have never done any work on the either of them in the past yet they keep on coming. I first received a jewellery design job about 8 months ago and told them about it, I got the standard "new system please me patient, teething troubles etc" yet they are not only still coming but have multiplied. 8 job selections yesterday not one was I qualified to do or appeared anywhere in my profile :(
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@Deb - forgive me if I am getting this wrong, pleeassse, but one of your specialist areas is blog writing???? Could the 'Prepress' have come from 'press', 'newspapers', 'writing'?? See where I'm going here? Not sure about the Jewellery bit though, unless the word 'Design' has something to do with it??? I reckon they may be playing around with the links/relationships between the keywords somehow?????
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@ Paul, its a crappy form. You click on, put your q in a box, it redirects you to a page where they want your name, email addy etc or give you the option to log in again, when you shouldn't really have logged out considering you just asked them a fecking q and there is this message;
We’ll send you an email or SMS as soon as you get the first answer.
We estimate that to happen within an hour or so.
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@Deb / @Malcolm
I don’t believe that the keywords used are restricted to what we have in our profiles. Can’t help thinking you may have written an article or post for a client with those keywords? It seems that trawling for keywords has been done across the board, and that may include any messaging you may have done with clients or prospects. So, if you ever wrote an article about/exchanged ideas about jewelry – possibly only mentioning the fact that tourists visit a place to see the ‘beautiful jewelry made by the local artisans’ - you have been tagged with that jewelry thing. Possible? I reckon it’s probable. Not good! -
@Roland, I am sure they are matching keywords in messages with clients or in job the titles of jobs discussed: I started getting offered bookkeeping jobs after talking to a client about writing bookkeeping software (the one discussed earlier in this thread who was offering £300 for a job that would realistically cost £300,000).
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I definitely think that they are trawling our messages for keywords as a few weeks ago I bought a writer's hourlie and asked them to write a blog post for me. Since then I've had numerous emails selecting me to bid on blog and writing jobs. I've also done some work through one of my hourlies inputting business contacts onto Zoho and since then I keep being selected for CRM programming jobs. Grr...
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