Month: May 2012

Freelancer.com is a great resource for finding temporary talent to help you with you software development project (or one of hundreds of other categories of work). But if this is the case, why is their website soooo annoying to use?

I have a project currently open and am in communication with my offshore guy doing the work. He posts new files to the site almost daily, and the email I receive includes a link to “view files”. perfect! But when I click on this link, what follows is similar to my related experiences with the site, which is are often ones of frustration. This link loads the project page, but no files. Where are the file? Wander around a bit, and then finally realize, oh I’m not logged in. The link was to go view files, not to view the project page, so why didnt the site prompt me to login? Also, why didn’t it remember my login? I’ve specifically told it ever time to remember my login.

Ok, so this is just one little bug, no big deal. Except that, this is typical of every part of Freelancer.com that I use. I can never find what I need, if I want to see current stuff I’m working on it requires I go to some top level menu and drill down through several links before even getting close. Add on top of all this that the site is often quite slow, and this slowness combined with the excessive use of ajax screen refreshes which don’t always show any kind of wait spinner… you sometimes aren’t sure if anything is happening at all.

To add to this headache, I tried to fill out a form to list some services my company performs. I fill out half the form, then hit a rich text eentry box which refused to take focus and let me type in it. Woops. I guess it’s not IE9 compatible, so I turn on compat mode. Now it lets me type in the box, but after filling the whole form and clicking submit… nothing. It just sat there, and didn’t do a thing. I finally tried this whole thing again in Chrome and it finally worked. I then popped up a support window and reported the IE9 bug, and was told basically that yes, if you have problems on our website, please use something other than IE. Really?

Maybe it’s time for freelancer.com to put a project on their own site to get some resources to fix all their issues. I just hope this isn’t what they did originally.

Oh and one more thing- employers like myself would love a mobile version of your site.

Our primary webserver was taken offline yesterday for a while, which we figured out was due to it being overwhelmed by RDP login attempts The security audit log showed thousands of login attempts on various user names, from a variety of IP addresses. so just blocking an IP would not help. We finally decided to just change the default RDP port to an unknown one. In the process of changing the firewall rules for the new port, and doing all this configuration over RDP itself, we managed to lock ourselves out of the server completely… even though we were doing things specifically to make sure this didn’t happen, sometimes those plans just don’t quite work out.

The good news is the guys are Codero were able to get us straitened out without issue. Once I logged back into the server, there was my corrected firewall rule, already configured and ready to go. Big thanks to the guys at Codero for continuing to give great tech support!