terrygrantvo

I have nothing of value to add except to say that this whole thread is awesome.

Those of us in the US (I assume elsewhere too) can just write it off, as this is a textbook definition of a business expense, but there is a point at which it becomes about the principle of the thing, yeah? The only feature I find useful is the ability to turn on RTO when I am going to be out of town, and if they're going to charge everyone the same inflated rate, then I'll probably just cancel and only ever fire it up when I need RTO. Kind of like how I only have Netflix when they put something out I actually want to watch. Buyer Insights was kind of useful at first, then it became obvious the info they were providing was a generalized guess at best. My SM is a very nice person, but there isn't much she can really do for me, as maintaining a gig isn't rocket science and they're not allowed to act as CS either. I already get the 7 day clearance from TRS. The 'advanced stats' are laughable because again - maintaining a gig isn't hard. The partridge squawked too much and the pear tree died after a year, so what else is left?

Thank you @Lena Several gig extras are just gone (important ones too, like Rush Delivery, Full Buyout, etc) and if I copy/paste a block of text using a pre set key command it just freezes the whole window and I have to force quit Chrome and restart. This thing is broken.

@Lena Just a heads up, but the new window design came back and it still has all the same issues. Gig extras are missing and if I copy/paste text via a key command the whole page freezes and I have to quit Chrome and start over. It is nice though to finally be able to type and view more than one sentence at a time. I don't feel like I'm sending quotes on Instagram anymore. 😉

If it matters at all, I'm pretty sure Fiverr is too. I'm PRO and TRS and I have a 9.

You know what's funny about that? (well nothing really, but let me have this one) - that's how it used to be for me - for years - until this redesign. Every single gig extra I had ever created was listed in the custom order pop up and I couldn't do anything about it. Most of them were redundancies of each other because the stupid system is so finicky about the language and syntax you use when typing out the titles. One positive thing about this redesign - we can finally use the entire text box to type in because they moved the character counter out of the container that held the text box as well. I went back and forth with tech support and CS for years trying to get them to understand the problem with that. It was like trying to type messages on Instagram. Bleck...

Cheers Lena, thank you.

fwiw, I tried to report this to CS yesterday and at first I got the cut n paste 'unplug it and plug it back in' response, and after telling them that it wasn't any of that, they insisted I send them a screen recording explaining the problems in detail before they'd even consider kicking it up to tech support. Maybe someone here can get the ball rolling on a fix? @Kesha @ran_success @Lena @noahd_success

If I copy paste text (via autohotkey) the page freezes and I have to quit out and fire up another browser window. Also, not all the gig extras are available. Rush Delivery, for instance, is missing. Same on Mac and PC with different browsers. Anyone else seeing this?

That's 4 stars in 'Value For Money' from me, dog.

'I will paint you a picture with blue paint for $5' 'I will paint you a picture with blue and red paint for $5' 'I will paint you a picture with blue and red and green paint for $5' Yeah, I've never understood that either.

I wish someone would acknowledge my 'conthribucy as a valued seller and person'. This cat would be lucky to get a 3 for effective communication under the new system.

FWIW, I've been seeing both (value for money & service as described) for the last couple of weeks, so I think it's just random trials, unfortunately.

Whoa whoa - what is this, a professional freelancing website? C'mon man...

My best guess is that Fiverr has been (for a while now) trying to create volatility in the seller ratings to better allow their search AI or algorithm to decide who gets to put food on the table that week. I imagine that's what the private reviews were supposed to do, but so few buyers actually leave private reviews that they probably didn't have the desired effect, so now they're setting out to destroy public reviews as well, in order to introduce the level of volatility in personal ratings that they're after. With more volatility in the seller ratings there can be more volatility in the search rankings and it gives them an easy out every time someone complains, because they can more easily say - 'You're not doing better in searches because of your rating. See? It's your fault'. I mean, they've been saying that for ages now anyway, but this at least makes it an easier sell and it's easier to defend.

At the very least, I think we can all agree that Fiverr themselves get a -5 for 'Effective communication'. (as in negative five) Good god, this is a catastrophe the likes of which I have rarely ever seen. It would actually be sort of funny if it weren't so vitally important that they not mess this part up.

What's baking my noodle currently is that, just a couple of months ago, they announced they were relaxing the qualifications for the Pro program to the point where a woodland creature with a smartwatch & a sunny disposition could get in, and now fast forward to today where it seems like they're hell bent on making literally all of us as miserable as possible. Who is making the decisions over there and why is the answer three kids in a trenchcoat?

Well if it's not being done by AI then how on earth are you determining whether or not I'm being 'professional' in my communication with clients? How specifically is this being determined? Are there keywords that are getting flagged? Are you guys reading all of our messages? How do you know when I am using 'jargon' or 'lingo' and when I am not? (I read everything at the links, they don't address anything specific)

This is ultimately one of the most frustrating parts to this. A lot of us in VO (and I'd imagine this goes for most verticals) are already charging a 3rd of what we charge in the real world (especially when it comes to rights), as we simply can't charge standard rates here, or we'd never get hired. Seems like it'd be a good idea for them to foster an environment in which we could charge an appropriate rate because, you know, it means more money for everyone. These new rating and leveling systems encourage the very opposite of that and I am utterly at a loss as to why they think this is a good way to treat your (actual) professional sellers. I could maybe see the point of all this nonsense if they were using it as a way to shake the tree of low hanging fruit in an attempt to weed out the kids who really have no business being here, but to treat everyone like this is truly insulting.

I opened the page, saw how poorly formatted the very first question was, and closed the page. I assumed the rest was just as bad, so good to know I didn't miss anything. 🙂

I would argue the opposite is true. I don't think most buyers give two giggles what your score is as long as it's not alarmingly lower than everyone else's. They look at the price, and then your work, and decide if you're going to make them look good or not, and that's about it. Even if you were right about this, the new system isn't a going to be any better a gauge of a sellers value or performance, as the lower ratings we're all destined to have are going to come mostly from buyers who would have normally left 5 stars. This new system is literally designed to make it harder to leave a 5 star review, period. That's it. No matter how Kesha or anyone else tries to spin this, it's pretty clear what they're after here, and it isn't 'transparency'.

I agree, which is why this makes no sense. Even less than the other ideas... this makes negative sense. 🙂 I assume it'll depend on how quickly it affects your bottom line. At least that's the way I'll be looking at it.

It absolutely is, but again - I think that's the point. With respect to Kesha, this is about one thing and one thing only - unbundling the crowd of us at the top with 5 star ratings. They need to more easily be able to excuse the volatility of the algorithm because that isn't going to stop. This, and really every inane idea they've implemented over the last few years (repeat business score, private reviews, etc) are just trying to address the fact that they have to 'spread it around' to keep as many of us as possible just happy enough to not leave the site altogether. Mind you - they still very much expect us to do 5 star level work, they just have no intention of letting us keep the 5 star ratings anymore. This has nothing at all to do with making the experience here better for sellers or buyers.

So it appears that private reviews are staying. They're just going to be there twice now, essentially. First as part of the new public review, and then again privately. I and struggling to see any reason for this beyond trying to make sure fewer (if any) sellers are able to maintain a 5 star rating.

I hate to say it, but I'm beginning to think that's the point. This is going to result in a whole lot of perfectly satisfied buyers unknowingly leaving 3.5 star reviews, which in turn means eventually no one will have a 5 star rating overall, and I think it's intentional. There are probably too many sellers in virtually every vertical on the site for how much demand there actually is, which means they can't possibly make all of us happy. All they can do is try and make the majority of us just happy enough to not quit, and the only way an algorithm can do that is if they have a clear number by which to separate one from the next. Currently, there are a ton of us with 'perfect' 5 star ratings and the system has no idea what to do with that. There's a dead simple way to fix this, if simplifying things is actually the goal here - do away with private reviews all together. Give buyers the option to make the one review they leave (at the time of closing out the order) either public or private, and then just get your value and weight from that and that alone. What they're doing here is combining private and public reviews into a new 'public' review, but then also keeping the private reviews, which are literally the same thing as the new half of the new public review (the emoji nonsense). It's really hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to make the personal scores more granular and thereby make it easier for the system to decide who gets to show up in searches that week, rather than just vetting sellers like they should have been doing all along. It could just be the tin foil hat talking, and I certainly don't want to be right about this, but...