This thread has been witness to some immature behaviour shown by a few members. What follows below is my independent review on the situation and circumstances that evolved. I am a freelancer and not associated with ForumElevation, sims2, lindmar or any paid posting company. @ sims2 1) What is your privacy policy? Does law gives you right to share the poster's details or information with client, especially email address or related? Are you sharing email databases? Come on, you need to mature and respect privacy of your posters as well, for they entrust you with their contact details and also paypal address. This act of yours is going to hurt your company's reputation alot and any sensible client will not place orders because if you can't respect privacy of people who work for you and bring reputation (good or bad) for your company, how can you guarantee respecting client's privacy. 2) Do you feel, you are working in best interest of your company when you are providing such sensitive information and passing the blame on to some poster? Unless driven by extreme poverty and need for few bucks, any poster reading this thread, will prefer to keep away from your so-called company. You may weed off bad ones, but in process also miss out on good ones, because your relevation of poster's details is an attack on the trust they placed on your company while they were hired. Needless to say, if they fail you, there are other ways to solve that, instead of publically sharing their contact details. Besides, what makes you think that they can not change email addresses or present to you changed name and even get payments accepted by others (ref. postingpays case, heavily discussed few days earlier)? 3) If some poster does good job and client is impressed, do you post their name in forum threads suggesting potential clients about that poster? If no, then who gave you right to mess with anyone's information or pass blame on them, especially when they are not here to defend themselves? It is easy to pass the blame, but difficult to accept it as your fault. Logically all blame for failure of their workforce passes on to the company and not the employees. Thats what makes a company different from an individual providing service. Have you ever seen Microsoft displaying their employee name against the exploit blaming them for missing it out? You are good to accept allocades but when it comes to bashing, you quickly slip out details of some poster. HIGHLY UNPROFESSIONAL to say the least. 4) Do you understand passing on the email address of someone you hired can expose them to receiving spams at address through which they conduct their business? (@lindmar, i am not pointing it to you, its a general reference, pl. don't take it as an offense.) 5) You should have tried and resolved this issue with lindmar before he posted here and if lindmar didn't approach you, in that case, he was doing nothing more than defamation. No offense to lindmar here. sims2, grievances should be solved before they reach public forums, since it saves you from embarassment unless you can justify your stand. If you were to accept his claims, why didn't you sort it out before letting it trickle through in this forum and now get spidered by google? Anyways, please do not feel offended by the points raised by me. These points are to let you know few things that are missing from your approach, should you consider avoiding such a situation in future and build a reputation for your company in future. @ lindmar 1) Lets be honest here. I feel you should have tried to resolve it with them before jumping on to forum. And if they refused to solve it, then forum was always there to post in. But jumping on to the forum and freaking here, gave masala to few and also brought in embarassment for sims2, though you got the refund. What is left now, is for sims2 to clean off the mess and may be an entry in google which shall continue to reflect against their company's reputation as and when search is made. Service is all about reputation and freaking acts like this doesn't affect client much but company's reputation is put at stake. If you had problem, you should have contacted them directly. (ref. clause 4 of their TOS) Since you talk about having dealt with copyright infringements before, i guess you still have to explore the clauses for defamation and also learn to read TOS of a service provider before you request a service. (ref. clause 7, 8 atleast). 2) How would you feel if your contact details are posted in public forum which is witness to more than 20K members and has sizeable number of guests, spiders, robots, crawlers and spammers? Anyone who posted such posts was headache of sims2 and not yours. Besides you had no authority to post anyone's details publically unless you have taken informed consent from such a person directly (not company. Signing up for forum does not give you any such permission unless you are served notice by law to produce details and also in such cases, you can not pass information to anyone other than honourable courts.) Will you take responsibility, if their email addresses start getting spam because of your actions here? 3) You should not have displayed any email/ PM unless challenged by sims2. Posting it outright without a provocation explains how sensitive you are towards privacy and other's reputation, besides security. Pl. don't feel offended lindmar, there are few things which need to be looked into, should you have problem in future. Just a word of caution here :- If that poster is less than 13yrs in age, sims2 and lindmar both of you are in trouble, should their guardian pursue this matter with seriousness. Trust me, I am saying so after considering all apsects and I don't find escape route for either of you. And when i say underage, i mean real age, not the hyped up age, which a company is bound to confirm while enrolling or hiring people for work. So, now law comes into force and everything from existence of company to sharing information gets questioned. Think about it sims2. And lindmar, defamation suites can get nasty, so just be cautious before you start bashing them without exhausting all contact-support facilities available to sort out the matter mutually with the company in question. Please don't take it as some offense. Things mentioned are for your reference only and may be help you in future. Well, atleast you do realize now that if you want quality service, you need to spend money. Cheap company packages will get you cheaper poster and cheapest postings. Consider it like this. If you pay $0.20 to company, they will keep nearly half of it and pay poster $0.10. And if you thought anyone getting $0.10 for a post will be enthuthaistic about posting on your forum and shall post with devotion you want them to, then you are highly mistaken. Its all about law of proportions. If someone gets lesser money, they will try to do as many orders as they can to make substantial money, whereas people who get more money will need to do lesser orders to get similar amount of money. So, the law holds true here as well. I am a freelancer and have been providing various services for nearly two years now. I know from my experience that there is a burnout factor as well. All those who advertise 100 posts a day are not going to last long with quality and if you need to keep yourself motivated and avoid burnout, you must spend only that much time during which you enjoy doing work and not feel it like a burden, rather than sitting whole day and making 100 posts. If anyone claims they can make 100 posts a day, is either sitting whole day doing this work or throwing in low-quality posts or just blabbing. Hiring services may though hire different people to do it, but again law of proportions as stated above comes into play. Additionally, any time you find a company passing blame on its staff, is just not worth it. This is first sign of immaturity and really questions on what basis do they claim themselves to be a company? As I said above, failures of workforce adds to bad name of company and blame is passed on to company and not poster, so company can not absolve itself from its liabilities by slipping out name of posters as the responsible party. This is HIGHLY UNPROFESSIONAL. Next thing to understand is why would anyone close their doors to making money? I refer to poster here. Think again on that part. It leads us in various directions. Either poster was novice and not groomed properly by the company before pushing him into the service area, again fault lies with company, who should have groomed such posters before entrusting them with as serious as client's live forum. Other thing that comes to mind is under-pay which would have forced poster to finish more orders to make money he would have otherwise made out if this company had good paying rate. This again points the finger on company. If Microsoft pays their emplyees good salary, it is for a reason. Similarly, if a company pays its posters a good salary, its workforce will always try to maintain their relation with the company and that means try to impress upon the company owner, one of the ways towards that is doing good posts for client, which benefits everyone. There is more to this problem than passing blames or sharing information of a person whose side of story remains unheard off untill now. Coming to next point you made about workforce and outsourcing. I know 99.9% of so called companies are nothing more than hiring services who hire freelancers from here and there to get work done. This includes most who advertise here and in other forums. People have started using word company for their services while they are themselves nothing more than agents hiring freelancers. How does this qualify them to use word company is still beyond my understanding and against minimum requirements of the law of the land, but as it continues, few clients themselves demand a company doing their job, which in fact is nothing more than asking agents to hire people to do the job. So, how can you object to outsourcing they do, when they are based on hiring others only? And if you thought they hire such posters in legality, well its time to come to another fact. They get orders and then approach posters with max. payrate for the job, so if poster is ready, he goes ahead with work. And over 85% posters are same as working for all these companies. So, its effectively similar workforce branded differently. Does that clear out confusion? I am from India. I have been and shall remain a freelancer, untill there is time and funds to raise an office, get employees who sit in office and do work, besides my office gets sales tax, license code and is bound by business laws. And untill that time, i shall continue as a freelancer. There is no harm in hiring a freelancer, for you know that person you are talking to is the person who will work, so you can very well make out the quality you shall get. Also, you know that one to one relation in here, lasts longer and any time you need service, you'll get same poster, provided they are available. Moreover before placing any order, you must always ensure the quality and availability, besides past records of the person concerned. iTrader ratings are fine if they have negative ratings, but otherwise its easy to get ratings, isn't it? Preferably if they have a site where they can be reached, its an advantage. If the service provider is in your country, you can always get their telephone details and talk to them, which gives you the sense of security and assurance, besides approachability. India has a very high competitive edge and internet business isn't that much a career here. We all compete in exams to get entry into various colleges. The very profession i am in, i had to compete with over one lakh (one hundred thousand) students just to make it to top seventy and enter the course. This was a national level exam and i am not the only one. There are many like me. So, we have cut-throat competition and interent businesses usually is a side-business or a hobby for most. In my case, i enjoy it and after all day work, i spend my evenings and considerable portion of night doing work. It keeps me occupied and in addition gets me some extra bucks, but thats only when $ is converted into Rs.. Otherwise its not that profitable to spend that much time for a few bucks, especially when taxation takes substantial portion out of the money you make. So, if you thought people from India aren't upto quality, well think again. Ones who provide quality are in abundance, you just need to broaden your mindset and may be put price on backburner for its time that counts and they are not going to spend time for pennies. Now ones who are able to do it for cheap are usually kids (teenagers) who see this as a venture to make quick money, and since they don't pay taxes to govt., they can do it cheap. Still to consider is a section of youths who are unemployed and would do it for whatever comes their way, just to make some money. If you stuck around with a kid, it depends on your luck then. Don't blame it on to others. You went for cheap pricing and thats what you got. Nothing to do with India, nothing to do with paid posting as such. Its you who needs to sort out your priorities and when I say you here, i mean all clients and potential clients for any service provider. If you want quality and devotion, it comes at a price. But are you ready for it?
Hello, Thank you for raising these points and your comments will be taken into consideration. However, I have not publicly displayed any of the posters information and the information that I did send on, to only one other owner of paid posting services, was not more that you could already find in this thread posted earlier by lindmar. This poster broke the law and I am trying to make sure other companies do not have to deal with the recoil of the situation. This happens in high streets too, such as if someone is banned from a night club thier information and details may be sent round to other night clubs which may also ban this person. Secondly, we were in email contact and trying to resolve the problem before lindmar posted on here. I have no clue why he decided to post on here other than to publicly denounce us. I to wish it could have been sorted out privately, but as we live in different time zones I think maybe he felt he couldn’t wait for a reply and thought that posting on here would speed things up. However, thank you for your constructive criticism and as I said before I will improve some of the points you mentioned.
As I said earlier. We resolved this. I slipped by acting a little early. Luke resolved this quickly and I'm happy about the outcome. As far as I'm concerned, this whole thread can be deleted.
So, did you. You don't even have any policy or TOS or job agreement with posters, so legally you aren't allowed to do any thing of that sort. And your company isn't a nightclub, so why not compare it with say biggies like Microsoft. Anyways, it was for your consideration only and since you have taken note of the same, you may decide what policy to follow.
Oh, too bad? He got banned for ? Anyone knows? Maybe he was spamming his services via PMs? Usually DP doesnt ban for giving bad services.
Hehe! Okay, Shouldn't crap about him. Sorry Sims., was just kidding. When you come back incase you get a chance, don't mind. Please tell us why and what happened. We are eager?
No idea. I haven't worked with them before. DP, might not be the only place to contact them. Contact them via their site. Don't you got any email from their side regarding your order? And have they started working yet? Ask them if they have or not Secondly, when have you paid them, how long has it been that they haven't started working? Before filing a claim and opening such topic, one should take care of these things. As, whenever you do this, you should be completely sure that you have been cheated, if not, you should wait. Otherwise, you are actually harming the company. Anyways, I am just being general, no support anyside.
Well, I wouldn't advise you anything of that sort here. Eversince this thread came into light, few of their customers would have had sleepless nights over the quality of service and payment issues. I would suggest you the following to decide how to proceed on from here :- 1) Think again, why did you place order with them? What makes it necessary to reconsider your order with them? 2) Could this thread be one off case or have you unearthed more shocking stories and allegations on their services? 3) What does their TOS say on refund and cancellation? 4) Have they faulted on their part to provide you what was promised? Once you have clear cut answers to the same, you know what to do. Filing a claim through paypal may leave bad taste for both of you, so unless there is a specific reason and talking to them does not help, then that option is open for you, but before you use that, atleast get in touch with them through messengers and emails and preserve the conversation records for later, if req. You need to exhaust available contact avenues before filing claims. You may consult lindmar over how to contact them, now since sims2 has been banned here. Bottomline is that unless you have a reason for rollback, you should continue since you placed order after considering all necessary aspects, atleast that is what we expect at time of placing orders.
I havent been able to contact him through DP and I submitted a support ticket on his website but no reply. Also he has not started the service yet and it has been about 3 days. Its only been a few days since payment so I will give it till Friday. After that, if I get no response I may end up filing a claim. Thanks
Good! If no responce and no start.... tell them that you are filing a claim. A claim can anytime taken back, if they plan to refund. So, there might not be much problem of sims2's regarding paypal. There is nothing stated to how long the services hasnt started that the buyer can ask for a refund. As incase of Lindmar, there was no judgement related to this TOS. It was as general it should be.
lindmar's case was a copyright violation, where forumelevation risked to land in trouble, more so for taking money to provide product that is copyrighted or has copyright infringements. It was a clear cut case which sims2 did not deny in public atleast. soultrader, i suggest you keep contacting them on daily basis by whatever means advertised and also get in touch with lindmar to know how me managed to contact them. You should strengthen your position by having documented evidence of your efforts in reaching them or trying to dissolve the issue.