Upwork now breaking notifications so people are missing messages, is yet another thing amongst a long list of things that Upwork has broken with the buggy mess that is the new Messages they rolled out last year. They allowed people to use https://www.upwork.com/messages/?forced to access the old Messages, but earlier this month, they removed this link and after reaching out to their support, they refuse to reinstate it, forcing everyone to use the new and not improved Messages, which they somehow manage to make even worse.
If anyone's looking for how to drive clients and contractors AWAY from your platform, just follow Upwork's excellent guide:
- Instead of releasing a new version of Messages that improves upon the original, release a broken buggy mess that removes numerous key elements and makes daily workflows more time-consuming and frustrating, affecting arguably the most important part of the platform.
- Break the online status in the sidebar, so that everyone’s online status always shows as offline except for the online status next to people’s messages within a person's chat which isn’t broken (yet).
- Break the scroll bar, so that you cannot even click and drag it like every other website in existence. When you click it, it just scrolls instantly to the bottom of the chat in a milisecond snap.
- Randomly send people’s messages when they press enter while in the middle of typing a message, even if they have pressed enter multiple times already in the same message, forcing them to now write replies separately in the Notes app and paste them into Upwork to send.
- Remove the ability to middle click images to open them in new tabs. Instead of keeping this 1 second incredibly useful and universally used ability, such as to compare revisions of art in multiple tabs, require users to now waste up to 20 seconds simply trying to open images in new tabs in full res.
- Change attachment viewing into an eye-cancerous experience, whereby clicking on an attached image displays a huge extremely pixelated low res version, which you stare at for 10 seconds, until it finally loads the high res version. Oh, and make the attachment viewer now cropped into squares, so that people cannot even see the top and bottom sections of art or whatever they're sending unless they download it to their computer.
- Crop thumbnails of attachments into squares too when sending more than 1, to make it harder for people to understand what they are.
- Make the text box smaller and less expandable when writing messages that expand the box, such as lists. When attaching images, make it worse than before by filling the text box with previews of all those attachments. Everyone prefers having the main part of the messaging experience changed to a tiny cramped box on their screen.
- Make quoting more time-consuming and illogical, by making it so that when they click ‘Quote Message’, they can no longer start typing immediately. Force them to click Quote Message, then click into the box, and then type, to repeatedly add extra wasted time.
- Break thumbnails of attachments that 1 person sends to the other in chat, so that they only show a gray and white checkerboard image, requiring the page to be refreshed once or sometimes multiple times for it to actually load properly.
- Send people’s partially written messages when pressing enter to select an emoji after typing part of that emoji's text command.
- Change bold formatting to essentially be non-existent, with bold letters looking almost identical to standard letters.
- Refuse for 2 years to develop a simple dark mode for a website that blinds with an insane amount of white everywhere, and do not care about your users with accessibility requirements such as those with light sensitivity, even when it's the year 2023 and such coding is basic. At the same time, make sure your new Messages constantly breaks dark mode extensions such as Noir, when the old Messages worked flawlessly with it.
- Change emojis to be a third or half the size they used to be, making them more difficult to see and physically requiring people to zoom or look closer.
- Repeatedly show a huge security policy popup when attaching files, and instead of making users agree to it once or placing it elsewhere, make sure it not only covers the most important part of your screen, but also have it shrink the chat box to only a few lines.
- Fail for 2 years to fix a smartphone app that is appalling and barely functional, even with the simple situation of having a conversation screen that actually works. Also don't include a dark mode for this either, forcing people to either be blinded by so much white again, or use their phone's accessibility options to invert the contrast of Upwork's app, while every other app on the phone respects the phone's dark mode preference. Forget about an iPad app.
- For a finishing touch, completely break notifications so that users have no idea when they've received messages from each other, affecting their livelihood in all kinds of ways and making them repeatedly check manually.
- Finally, give clients/contractors a particular URL to bookmark that allows them to use the old version of Messages that avoids all of the above issues, until you randomly remove it without warning. Then, force everyone to use the new Messages that, even after receiving numerous points of feedback via support and surveys for almost 2 years that clearly demonstrates how broken and illogical the new version is, is still a broken mess that gets worse every week.
If your clients and contractors are still hanging on after this, make sure you change your fees to prey on the most vulnerable and poor, while making the wealthiest wealthier. Don’t forget to lock them in for 2 years too, while constantly looking for other methods to exploit people's passions and livelihoods.
Thanks to Upwork's relentless pursuit of greed and dumb decisions to push your users off platform, I’m off to Google Chat.
