Jan 11, 2020 11:03:33 AM Edited Jan 11, 2020 11:19:11 AM by Preston H
Why do so many new Upwork freelancers create profiles while on vacation?
I'm just wondering.
For example, a person from Pakistan goes on vacation to the United Kingdom, and decides to create an Upwork profile account. But because of where they are logging in from, Upwork automatically selects the United Kingdom as their "country," and then they need help from an Upwork employee to set it to the right country.
If I go on vacation, then I want to spend my time visiting with the people I went to see, or seeing the sites, or relaxing, etc. I have never gone on vacation and then decided to focus on establishing a presence on a website devoted to doing work.
It strikes me as peculiar, and I have been wondering about this for a long time.
But I did not want to post in an existing thread, because I did not want to put any of these vacationing freelancers on the defensive.
And there are also freelancers who were not on vacation, but Upwork selects the wrong country for them. For example, they live in China but Upwork pre-selects the United States for them.
There are literally hundreds of posts about this (sometimes as new threads, sometimes added to existing threads, sometimes consolidated by moderators into existing threads), so this TRULY is not about any specific Upwork user.
Is Upwork's automated country-selection system really buggy? Or are the new freelancers doing something that inadvertently causes this to happen? (Using VPN? Logging into Upwork from a cell phone? Playing "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?")
Were some of the vacationing freelancers not "actually on vacation" but were intentionally trying to indicate the wrong country for some reason? Perhaps because they did not know about Upwork's location rules and/or perhaps because they didn't know about identify verification protocols?
It is not my intention to "call anybody out." If some users don't know all the rules and procedures when they are new to a system, that's quite understandable.
I think that Upwork's identity verification protocols and policies are a good thing, so I'm not suggesting any changes. I'm simply wondering about the many posts on this topic, and what other people think explains their frequency.