Hello,
Just a quick message about why I am closing my account at Upwork and am pretty disappointed in general.
I've had an upwork account for over 5 years and used it a few times for to hire for longer term contracts. Most recently, I hired a developer to help me with a few odd jobs. We've had the contract open for around a year. But most of my requests were met with "that's not my skill set" or "I don't know how to do that." So I had been planning on ending the contract.
Last week, my website was hacked. The developer was not available so I went elsewhere for the fix. It was a quick fix, and I am still making a few adjustments to protect my website in the future. But we had to go through all the basics of replacing the core web files...doing some database cleaning...etc.
I continued to give updates to the Upwork developer and try to keep them in the loop in case it affected any of their work.
After the hack, I noticed a broken element to the website and notified them to see if they could fix it. In the course of this, the developer became insulting, combative and blaming about the problem. Then refused to do the work. They said they weren't willing to help if anyone else was going to work on the website.
The original agreement was part time when needed. Hours had never exceeded 5 per week and I can for the most part self manage. But I occaissionaly have issues that are beyond me.
Because of the great changes out of the blue and the unprofessional and discourteous emails, and the fact that they weren't even available to fix my hack, I immediately ended the contract.
Because Upwork requires a rating when ending a contract, I gave them 3 stars all the way down and said their behavior was unacceptable and that I could just as easily blame them for the hack but didn't. When something bad happens you fix it. No big deal.
Now I am receiving harrassing and bullying emails demanding that I change my review. They are also threatening a response of leaving me a negative review. There is no apology - sorry you had a bad experience - I wish I could have helped. Nothing like that. Instead I am receiving threatening demands to change my review.
When I looked for a place to contact customer service or report harrassment. There's nothing. Upwork has nothing for this kind of problem. I'm clearly not the first person that this has happened to because you can read other accounts on the web.
It's clear that Upwork doesn't have policies in place to protect it's users. When I tried to message chat it just took me around a loop with a bot. I asked the bot to talk to a human. I asked the bot for a person. The bot instead gave me job listings and said "Is this what you want."
No, it's not.
So then I clicked "close my account." It says it can't close my account and gave me a phone number to call. So that's what I'll be doing.
Just a note to let you know what a huge oversight this all is and when I leave, I won't be back.
