TheWalkingDead
Well-known member
Ok, my issues are many at the moment so am just taking a moment to let of steam as have nobody else to let it off too.
2 weeks ago my bathroom and kitchen flooded, I now need £1000s of work doing which hopefully the insurance will cover, but that has caused a lot of stress. The first person I got in told me I would need a lot of working doing, I said OK, send me details of the cost, and I never heard from them again so had to start all over again.
I work from home sometimes, where I see people for advice and consulting work, so the flood damage, along with the disruption that is coming, along with mice running around everwhere, has caused enough stress in itself.
The day after the flood something else happened. 2 years ago a friend of a friend asked me to do a website for them, as I've always been Ok at doing that sort of thing, though am totally self taught. At the time I was starting a completely different business/career, so I actually tried to tell this person I couldn't do it. I gave them loads of advice on how to find someone, they then disappeared but then came back and said they couldn't find anyone, or there were companies trying to charge them HUGE amounts of money to do the project. After resisting for months, I was in a dire financial situation and agreed to do the site for them for a fee, I also halved the fee, and said if they made money from the project I would take a percentage of the profits in lieu of a big advance payment.
So eventually I did the site, it was hard work and challenging, but eventually I got it all as they wanted it. I bought a commercial script and modified that as best I could, and for some more technical parts I got someone in who tweaked some parts I didn't understand. We made it a UK based site in order to overcome some technical issues but the idea was it would eventually be for an international audience.
Then for 2 years nothing happened, until the day after my house flooded and I was already going a bit stressy to say the least. I got an email from the person I did the site for saying a news agency had run into the site and done an article on it and could we expand the site to this other country as that was where the article was based and people had emailed wanting to join the site.
I looked at the site and realised that somehow since we tested it all and it went live, parts of it were broken, and also realised that I didn't really know how to do any more work on it after 2 years of doing a completely different job and not doing any web development work. So I got in touch with the person who did the tweaks for me previously who really knew the script inside out - except he's gone, no reply, his domains are all parked and web accounts suspended....
So I go to the forum of the company which sold the script in the first place. Ah, at least that's still active! So I post a message asking if anyone knows where the developer has gone, and also another thread asking if there is anyone who can help us and we are willing to pay a fee for the help.
Both my messages get deleted and the owner tells us it's not allowed to ask for paid help. I ask him if we can pay him, since he wrote the script. He says no without even asking how much we want to pay him! :club: We haven't got much, but seriously if we'd had £100,000 to give him would he just shrug his shoulders and tell us to go away? Maybe he doesn't need money.
So I post on the forum asking for help on how to try to fix the issues and make the changes myself - and get flamed for asking for free help and get told this isn't a place to just get free technical help...
So I go on People Per Hour, post a fixed price job, and bids start coming in. I get chatting to a guy, who says sure he can do everything we need, and he posts a lower price than everyone else, so I end up accepting his proposal to do the work.
THEN he says that fee isn't for the actual work as he needs to look at the site and script first, so can I send him all the login details to our FTP and database etc. So I have this guy in another country, who has bid a fixed amount and then tried to renegotiate the fee before even doing any work, and he wants access which means he could actually hack and nuke everything we've got and could even say "pay more money or we delete your sites, I've changed the passwords sucker". There are plenty of scammers out there so it's not beyond possibility. It would also be breaking the law here to let him have access to the database becasue it contains private information about members :club:
And that's where I am stuck, I can't do the work myself and whichever solution I try to come up with, I come across dead ends. People I ask for help are vague or just refuse help altogether, I can't get anyone who knows the script to help us, I can't even post on the specialist forum for help without getting flamed or in trouble with the moderators.
Ok, that's all frustrating, and my view would be what the heck, we'll sort it in the end - but the site has been going viral for 2 weeks, it's been all over the press in this country, Twitter, Facebook, it's been on dozens of news sites online, and even been featured on radio and television programmes and people are signing up every minute and and also emailing from other countries asking just when the site will be available in their country!
The pressure is mounting from the person I did the site for as they naturally want me to make the site available to these other countries, and I think for someone with knowledge of the script and coding, it would probably be quite easy, but I can't find anyone to help for love nor money and can't do it myself, and feel like my back is to the wall with a gun to my head and I simply don't know what to do next.
Sorry this is long. It's just every avenue I try to follow to fix this seems a dead end. If it's going to be this big the site needs a proper development team working on it or at least someone who knows what they're doing, and that isn't me. I have work I need to keep doing to keep paying my bills and at the best of times that takes up 60-70 hours a week. With the flood, the mice, and now this total nightmare of a situation with the website, I feel like I'm going completely crazy at times
I can't see a solution at the moment I just want to disappear!
ETA: PS I also went back to the person who wrote the original script, told them about all the publicity the site was getting, and asked them for help again, as it would even be very good publicity for their business if this massive successful site was run using their script. Again, the answer was a flat, categorical no. WTF is wrong with these people?!
2 weeks ago my bathroom and kitchen flooded, I now need £1000s of work doing which hopefully the insurance will cover, but that has caused a lot of stress. The first person I got in told me I would need a lot of working doing, I said OK, send me details of the cost, and I never heard from them again so had to start all over again.
I work from home sometimes, where I see people for advice and consulting work, so the flood damage, along with the disruption that is coming, along with mice running around everwhere, has caused enough stress in itself.
The day after the flood something else happened. 2 years ago a friend of a friend asked me to do a website for them, as I've always been Ok at doing that sort of thing, though am totally self taught. At the time I was starting a completely different business/career, so I actually tried to tell this person I couldn't do it. I gave them loads of advice on how to find someone, they then disappeared but then came back and said they couldn't find anyone, or there were companies trying to charge them HUGE amounts of money to do the project. After resisting for months, I was in a dire financial situation and agreed to do the site for them for a fee, I also halved the fee, and said if they made money from the project I would take a percentage of the profits in lieu of a big advance payment.
So eventually I did the site, it was hard work and challenging, but eventually I got it all as they wanted it. I bought a commercial script and modified that as best I could, and for some more technical parts I got someone in who tweaked some parts I didn't understand. We made it a UK based site in order to overcome some technical issues but the idea was it would eventually be for an international audience.
Then for 2 years nothing happened, until the day after my house flooded and I was already going a bit stressy to say the least. I got an email from the person I did the site for saying a news agency had run into the site and done an article on it and could we expand the site to this other country as that was where the article was based and people had emailed wanting to join the site.
I looked at the site and realised that somehow since we tested it all and it went live, parts of it were broken, and also realised that I didn't really know how to do any more work on it after 2 years of doing a completely different job and not doing any web development work. So I got in touch with the person who did the tweaks for me previously who really knew the script inside out - except he's gone, no reply, his domains are all parked and web accounts suspended....
So I go to the forum of the company which sold the script in the first place. Ah, at least that's still active! So I post a message asking if anyone knows where the developer has gone, and also another thread asking if there is anyone who can help us and we are willing to pay a fee for the help.
Both my messages get deleted and the owner tells us it's not allowed to ask for paid help. I ask him if we can pay him, since he wrote the script. He says no without even asking how much we want to pay him! :club: We haven't got much, but seriously if we'd had £100,000 to give him would he just shrug his shoulders and tell us to go away? Maybe he doesn't need money.
So I post on the forum asking for help on how to try to fix the issues and make the changes myself - and get flamed for asking for free help and get told this isn't a place to just get free technical help...
So I go on People Per Hour, post a fixed price job, and bids start coming in. I get chatting to a guy, who says sure he can do everything we need, and he posts a lower price than everyone else, so I end up accepting his proposal to do the work.
THEN he says that fee isn't for the actual work as he needs to look at the site and script first, so can I send him all the login details to our FTP and database etc. So I have this guy in another country, who has bid a fixed amount and then tried to renegotiate the fee before even doing any work, and he wants access which means he could actually hack and nuke everything we've got and could even say "pay more money or we delete your sites, I've changed the passwords sucker". There are plenty of scammers out there so it's not beyond possibility. It would also be breaking the law here to let him have access to the database becasue it contains private information about members :club:
And that's where I am stuck, I can't do the work myself and whichever solution I try to come up with, I come across dead ends. People I ask for help are vague or just refuse help altogether, I can't get anyone who knows the script to help us, I can't even post on the specialist forum for help without getting flamed or in trouble with the moderators.
Ok, that's all frustrating, and my view would be what the heck, we'll sort it in the end - but the site has been going viral for 2 weeks, it's been all over the press in this country, Twitter, Facebook, it's been on dozens of news sites online, and even been featured on radio and television programmes and people are signing up every minute and and also emailing from other countries asking just when the site will be available in their country!
The pressure is mounting from the person I did the site for as they naturally want me to make the site available to these other countries, and I think for someone with knowledge of the script and coding, it would probably be quite easy, but I can't find anyone to help for love nor money and can't do it myself, and feel like my back is to the wall with a gun to my head and I simply don't know what to do next.
Sorry this is long. It's just every avenue I try to follow to fix this seems a dead end. If it's going to be this big the site needs a proper development team working on it or at least someone who knows what they're doing, and that isn't me. I have work I need to keep doing to keep paying my bills and at the best of times that takes up 60-70 hours a week. With the flood, the mice, and now this total nightmare of a situation with the website, I feel like I'm going completely crazy at times
I can't see a solution at the moment I just want to disappear!ETA: PS I also went back to the person who wrote the original script, told them about all the publicity the site was getting, and asked them for help again, as it would even be very good publicity for their business if this massive successful site was run using their script. Again, the answer was a flat, categorical no. WTF is wrong with these people?!
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