Upwork needs to upgrade its algorithm now !!!!!!!

[abhish3kr]

I know upwork has been good over the past years for both freelancers and clients. But recently things are falling apart. These days the clients on upwork are increased with spammers and clients who just posts jobs to waste time of the freelancers. 

So to find quality clients on upwork, i tried to filter the spammers and this is what I found!

1. Number of spammers have increase by more than 40%

2. Most clients just post jobs to waste our time ( they never interact with any single freelancer and in result the connects are wasted!)

3. Most clients have posted more than 20 jobs at the same time and they never reply to any freelancer. Its hard to find quality clients these days. 

To upgrade the quality of clients on upwork, they can think of doing these things in particular to help the fellow freelancers. 

1. Clients should get a limit of days to get their payment method verified. 

2. Those who have posted  10+ open jobs with 0 interaction in a very short time(<3 days), they should be filtered anyway.

I would appreciate other freelancers to comment your thoughts or add some more point if you think you do feel the same these days on Uwpork. 

Regards,

Abhishek K

[secretdesign]

Nicely writen @Abhishek K. I came here to write exacly the same thing.

[debi-f · Accepted solution]

Hello!

I agree with you and your suggestions. I posted my comment also, after 12 years working here, it is really hard to find a job now.

I think, also, that clients should pay to post a job and if they hire a freelancer and the job is completed and paid, they can receive their money back. Of course, they have to verify first their payment method. 

Another suggestion we made: not boosting bids, or Upwork can limit it to 10 connects. There are freelancers that posted proposals with 500 connects. This is Upwork's business, getting money from freelancers buying connects. So, why will they control clients? They want the freelancers to buy connects and apply, no matter if the client is serious, real or a scammer... ☹️ 

https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Upwork-after-12-years/m-p/1171969#M711146

https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Not-a-fan-of-bidding-and-the-bidding-table/td-p/1183935

https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Buying-connects-boosting-bids-Yes-or-No/m-p/1186496#M717...

[73ea289b]

Yes, I am agree with you now upwork taking too much money from freelancer from buying connects.

[759e32fa]

Hi Abhishek and Debora,

Thank you for reaching out to us and sharing your feedback and concerns. Our teams are working to address the situation around scam and spam jobs, including higher than usual volumes of scam posts, constantly changing methods of scam accounts, and gaps in user education around Upwork TOS and safety. Additionally, I assure you that we'll continue sharing users' feedback with the team and providing updates to the Community about the team's initiatives.

[debi-f]

Thank you, but we are sharing our concerns for months now. And nothing changed.

Not only about the scammers, also about the boosting and buying connects method for bidding.

Why doesn't Upwork take all our suggestions to improve our experience with clients and bidding?

Why don't you change methods that, clearly, are not working?

[secretdesign]

I fully agre with  Débora F

[7f9b79df]

---

Annie Jane B wrote:

Hi Abhishek and Debora,

Our teams are working to address the situation around scam and spam jobs....

---

With all due respect: Absolute B.S.

Just take a look in this forum and you'll find years of complaints about scam/spam jobs. And NOT just complaints, but a TON of ideas to solve the problem. 

However, perhaps I'm completely wrong; if I am, please provide a link that fully details what action has been taken by Upwork, including before and after metrics.

[63959f4d]

Couldn't agree any more. I flagged a couple of posts without payment verification as inappropriate at a time, however, what made me more frustrated was that the platform regarded my operation as abusive behaviors, and suspended my account for 24 hours. I've been thinking that since the platform warns that freelancers should be more cautious about the job posts without a payment verificaton, then why does they allow them to constantly post such jobs? Why cannot they make some access restrictions when posting a job? I feel a little bit confused.

[feed_my_eyes]

Clients don't have to verify their payment methods until they find a freelancer that they want to work with. You aren't allowed to flag jobs as inappropriate just because you disagree with them; you're wasting customer service time, when they should be dealing with jobs that are actual scams..

Upwork telling new freelancers to "be cautious" is very different from saying "don't apply". I work with new, unverified clients all the time and have never had a single problem. But if you don't want to see job posts from clients with unverified payment methods, you can use the advanced search function and simply filter them out.

[63959f4d]

I appreciate for your post, which is likely to be quite helpful to other freelancers here on Upwork.

Yeah, I totally agree with you, and your suggestions are objective and reasonable. However, I actually saved quite a few job posts without payment verification in order to test their authenticality; and a few months later, I found that over 99% of them never hired any freelancers only with one or two job posts saved in their account. Maybe, this only happens in my field. Yeah, indeed, I don't deny that there are a few opportunities hidden in those unverified posts, and some top freelancers can give it a try. However, from my perspective, it is not a good choice for freelancers, especially new-comers to bid for these posts, when it comes to time and communication costs. 

[feed_my_eyes]

If it's not working for you, it would make sense to filter out these posts - you do have a choice. I don't see why you feel like it's necessary to limit other freelancers' choices and negatively impact their businesses. 5 out of the last 6 new clients that I got here were new and unverified at the time that they hired me. Maybe you just need to get more experience in figuring out which jobs are legit or not.

[tlsanders]

What made you think it was okay to report postings that do not in any way violate Upwork's rules? 

[63959f4d]

Don't you think a helping hand is much better than a pointing finger?

[rolludesig]

Totally agree and along with it now clients are asking for free samples/mockups before acceptance of proposal and i had flagged such messages few times now but i dont think any action was taken on it...the upwork team really should look into this issue as well

[miriam-ocampo]

Whenever someone asks me for a sample I just respond: "sure I can do it, but it needs to be a paid sample". So far I think just one client has paid for it. 

[roberty1y]

One thing Upwork could do to fix this problem is filter the freelancers. Stop allowing anyone and everyone to join up, even without a proper profile. 

The fact is that the proliferation of spam and scam postings doesn't affect honest clients who use the site, because they can't see any of that. Only freelancers see it.

What does put off clients are the worthless proposals clogging up their feed when they post a job. And it's these same clueless freelancers who are falling for scams and thus ensuring the scammers keep coming back.

[williamtcooper]

Just avoid the suspect postings.

[fdynasty]

What's a suspect posting?

Client with good work history, spend over 40k on upwork decide to post a job, and never responds to anyone?

Even after a week, he's not interviewing anyone and this has been the case for 2 months now, the client used to do interviews and you get to know that your proposal was not good enough.

Now even clients with good standing are acting like spammers, what I understand is some of the accounts got hacked and they are being used for spamming purposes.

I really don't care if i get hired or get a interview as long as the buyer is interacting with someone else, but that's not the case as off now.

[abhish3kr]

True past few months, its hard to get resposne from the clients. 

It might be for one reason that the freelancer who bids the highest might not have the right skillset or fit to the client and it may lead to the client that every freelancers are the same.

Skipping the bidding would help both the FREELANCERS and the Clients. 

[feed_my_eyes]

I believe that's because there are more and more unqualified freelancers joining Upwork every day, and clients get tired of reading all of the bad proposals, get discouraged, and hire elsewhere. I can't think of any reason why a previously good client would post a project just to waste their own and everybody else's time.

[mayalee99]

Highly agree; dear Upwork do something about this we all trying here.

[84bf99f1]

Am new here at Upwork and am looking for a job still l haven't finished my application yet. Please can you help me?