sannansyed

I have posted this here: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/104931/is-it-legal-for-a-website-to-reveal-the-earnings-of-the-freelancers-publicly-wit on Law StackExchange (a sister site of StackOverflow) because I have been wondering if what Fiverr is doing is even legal in most countries. Have a look at this post, and if you have anything of value to add, please do so after reading the site's tour and https://law.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-answer @priyank_mod I am pinging you because this might be of interest to you as well.

@anantafi @greenwordpress Yes, I am well aware at this point due to the discussion that happened at the start of the post (see the accepted answer). I appreciate you guys answering, but let's not add more answers that state the exact same thing, and perhaps focus more on the problem mentioned in this post, or discuss if any updates happen to its status. Once again, I appreciate you posting, and don't mean to discourage you, but this is just so that it is easier for future readers of the post to follow along what was discussed.

@listing_guys Well, it depends on a case by case basis. In certain gigs, it might prove useful, while in others, such as some software development ones, it might be entirely counterproductive because a lot of the times, certain things cost significantly different than others with the same development time, while they still technically fit within one gig. Also, sometimes, the time would be an inadequate representation of the time actually spent on the project. For example, in certain cases, there would be buyers that respond promptly while others who have a pattern of responding only after 5 or 6 business days and ending up prolonging the project. There are multiple factors that might show the time more than double, or in rare cases, even tripple than the actual time spent on the project itself. All in all, I think this is more counterproductive in a lot of cases which is the reason I am proposing to make this something a seller themselves can turn on/off instead of enforcing it. Oh, and not to mention the very slight and minor issue of them violating the personal rights of many individuals by revealing information about their earning without their consent 😊 /s. If you still consider this a great feature, then perhaps it would be helpful for you to provide some reasons for it.

@priyank_mod I am glad to see you already made a post on that.. But most importantly, I am glad to see that so many people care about this! Btw, regarding the posts, I am not sure how the process is on this website. Are similar posts okay here or do we have the same system as StackExchange to delete/close them? I can go ahead and remove my post if it is the latter case. Edit: Also, regarding the email, I can write it earlier than next month but am quite busy for a while and want to right a weightful, evidence-loaded email. So when I said next month, I meant next month at max. And I don't think it hurts for multiple people sending them the same email, I think it's probably even better as it would signify the weight of this problem. So I welcome everyone to write to them about it.

I am pinging the people who currently showed concern regarding this so that they may help in getting the attention of more people towards this problem. I hope you guys don't mind. @mandyzines @whatpress @lima_designer @nesa66 @amazon_express

I have decided to write an email to Fiverr's customer support to request the solution of this problem by having a feature added for sellers to toggle their preference to show their earnings or not sometime later next month. However, for it to even be considered as an option, this post needs enough people to agree with the fact that Fiverr is acting unethically by showing the earnings of sellers publicly without their consent and that this problem is detrimental for them to stay on the platform. My hopes aren't very high, but if this issue gets some serious attention, comments are posted in agreement, more such posts are created, etc., then we might be able to make a change.

@whatpress Agreed. Even the lowest quality freelancing sites respect the fact that publicly revealing your earnings is your individual right, and to whatever extent you see fit.

@lima_designer They can surely be inconsistent. I have noticed that it doesn't really show up in the mobile app the last time I checked but even then, I feel like most serious buyers use the website.

Well, I sure do hope it's included in the seller plus subscription if that ever happens and they don't charge additionally. But even then, It's just extremely weird to show this without consent. I don't know the laws but considering Fiverr's track record with the recent updates, I feel like they didn't consult the lawyers with this one. I think there's probably a law, perhaps in Europe, protecting people from sites publishing their private data, especially about something as sensitive as earnings, without their prior consent. Anyhow, in my case, it's consistently up. I refreshed it many times while being logged out, and on multiple devices. It doesn't show up yet on the mobile app, but still does on the website consistently.

When I visit one of my gigs on Fiverr, even when logged out (Inside an icognito tab), it shows me the amount of money each project has made me and its duration, like so: "PKR123-PKR789 Price 4 weeks Duration" I don't mind the duration, as it may be helpful in certain cases to know a seller's efficiency, but I don't want every random person visiting my gig to be able to see, even in a range, how much I make from any of my projects. I visited my gig today and was outraged seeing that they revealed this on my gig without prior consent from me. Do I not have the right to decide if my earnings should be public or not? I am currently not able to find any setting to change this in the Fiverr website and mobile app, but I really hope it exists. If it does not, then I hope this post gets enough traction and support from other sellers that it reaches Fiverr and makes them realize that they cannot just reveal anything they want from a seller's private info without consent just to gain the support of buyers. That, or for any other reasons they may have.

If what you say is exactly as it is, then the client has no basis to report you. They are either foolish or are trying to threaten you to get free work. Don't take a new project from them, maintain your politeness and professionalism throughout the conversation no matter how degraded said client gets, and simply refuse any more free work. All of that should go without saying. Secondly, their behavior is highly inappropriate and objectionable. If you can create some content with an email to the Fiverr support team and include screenshots as evidence as well (even though they can visualize the conversations) and send it, there's no reason to think that they will not side with you. I am aware that the Fiverr support can be unfair at times and unjustifiably side with the buyers, but if, once again, everything is as you say, then this buyer is ruining their case (no pun intended) with their own hands. I haven't handled someone who shot themselves in the foot this blatantly. My very few bitter experiences on Fiverr have only been with the more subtle type.

It looks like Fiverr silently fixed this : D. The local time of my client is shown correctly now (4 hours difference between BST and GMT+5).

Off-topic from this issue, I think there should be another post concerning AI-generated posts and how they should be avoided similar to StackOverflow: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-generative-ai-e-g-chatgpt-is-banned?cb=1

Yeah, sorry about the misunderstanding in my reply, I am really sleepy right now so I didn't read what I typed... 🤦‍♂️ Please read my most recent message for clarification that the attached image has nothing to do with Fiverr 😅.

For context, the dude in the Twitter doesn't have anything to do with Fiverr, I was talking about Fiverr in my own case (or another seller's) if something like that happens. The dude in the Tweet is talking about a recruiter from what it seems.

For some weird reason, that's contrary to what I have experienced. I quite frequently deal with clients from the UK and the reason I posted this question was because my previous idea was that my UK client's time is 5 hours behind mine (As I am in Pakistan), so I would schedule accordingly. Now due to this incident, I learned that the time in the UK is 4 hours behind mine during summer. This incident did not happen to me before and I always scheduled my meetings with the 5-hour assumption and arrived on time. I do not know the geographical reasons this happens but I have a feeling this is also a problem w.r.t. other parts of the globe, and Fiverr needs to fix this. I don't know about you but I don't wanna end up like the dude in one of these recent viral twitter posts because Fiverr decided to screw up what time it shows for my clients 💀 (See attached. I hope Ahmed does well): Right now, when I search "current time UK" on Google, it tells me the time and the timezone, which is GMT+1 (BST), but previously, it used to show GMT. So it looks like Google is able to get the time correctly, and I am sure that the native browser (or even backend) APIs should be able to do so as well (Didn't test as of right now).

You do have a fair point there that I did not think of when writing the post regarding the users being offline. But I think your suggestion of falling back to their method makes sense. About bandwidth, however, I believe the amount should be negligible since it is just one small string broadcasted over a socket connection. As for the wrong time being on the user's device, I think that is a rare occurrence. I mean, who willingly allows there to be the wrong time on a device they use professionally? Anyways, these are just some additional things I have mentioned in support of implementing this using the native APIs instead of doing their own in-house solution, as it is clearly more prone to bugs. I am okay with anything, really, as long as it works 😂.

Update: My client surprisingly returned after being offline for so long and I discussed the case with him on a positive note. Then he permitted me to contact customer support, I did so, and they cancelled the order without resetting my stats 😄.

I was coordinating with a client of mine for a meeting that was supposed to be at 11 AM their time (In the UK). I messaged them at 11 AM their time when it said Local time: Apr 15, 2024, 11:00 AM on my client's inbox page (Right below where it says the username of the client in a chat). My client did not arrive for a meeting, so I told them that we could postpone it. One hour later, my client arrived and told me that it is currently 11 AM at their place, and now, the Fiverr website is saying "Local time: Apr 15, 2024, 12:00 PM". I looked up if the UK (England in this case) has multiple time zones, and that's where I learned about something called British Summer Time (BST). During summers, the time in the UK is 1 hour ahead of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) timezone. However, this does not reflect on the FIverr chats. It seems that it always displays time in GMT in regards to people based in England. Suggestion: Fiverr should implement a more accurate timezone detection system and make sure that the time shown is accurate with the season of the year and the locale. Technical nitty-gritty and suggestions: Additionally, as a programmer, I suggest that they retrieve the user's time from the client-side. I.e., use the frontend JavaScript to simply generate the current time and stream it to the server. What I think they are doing currently is that they get the IP address of the client on the server side, using some in-house or third-party solution to detect a timezone for it and then they return an initial time to the clients. Or on second thought, they most likely just get the timezone at sign-up and keep it that until the user changes it explicitly, which would be even worse and defeat the whole point of showing the user's timezone to others in chat. If either of these are truly the case, then it seems like re-inventing the wheel for no apparent reason and it looks to be prone to bugs. On the other hand, client-side JavaScript by default gets an accurate time directly from the machine of the client with just one line of code. One concern with the suggested approach would be that the user might try (I can't see why, but let's just say they might) to fake their timezone as they have control over the client side, but... they can already do that by using a proxy or VPN and sending the request from a different IP. If the reason for not going with this approach is this concern, then I don't see how this can be avoided even with the current system. Looking forward to the Fiverr team doing something about this and ideas/thoughts from the Fiverr community. Kind regards. Sannan.

So here's the scenario, a buyer of mine placed an order about 2 years ago, I delivered it to him and he had some revisions he wanted to be done in the delivery, he said that he would send it in the form of a document, October 2023 now, he has not sent the document nor any other info. I messaged him during the time asking for updates but he never responded. Now, this year, he did get online after instantly going offline but he didn't reply to any of my messages. I am afraid of canceling the order because of one primary reason: I am a level two seller right now with already very low traffic for some reason, even though I complete 2 or 3 orders every month or so without a single later delivery in the past few months. Again, the order frequency is not amazing but I make software from scratch with programming, including cloud-based web apps and mobile apps. My projects are usually divided into multiple milestones and they do take a while. This has been my order frequency forever, the highest number of projects I ever completed in a month was 6. The point is, that this is not a frequency that is off from my normal one. If I cancel this order at this point in time, my traffic will get even lower than it is right now, with no way for me to get back to my current level without doing more than the normal amount of projects, and my Fiverr account may end up dead. The reason I am asking this question is due to the fact that my order completion rate has been 100% in the past 60 days, and I have 0 late deliveries in the past 60 days, alongside a clean record in following the Fiverr policies. I just don't see any reason for my account to suddenly go dead considering a normal order frequency. Currently, my only remaining suspicion is that this one order sitting in there for almost 2 years is slowly getting my points in the algorithm low due to it not being delivered in a long time. Does anyone have an idea if this could be the case? Does the Fiverr algorithm count projects that have been marked as late long ago and not been delivered?

@azerilla See the reply by @charlesm56

@charlesm56 Hi, I hope you are doing well. Thanks for the help, I am able to turn it off now with Ctrl+. as you said.

Oh and the only way I found out that it is called userway is that one day I loaded up my Fiverr and it just said something like "Userway screenreader enabled".

I have deleted all my Chrome extensions to no avail, and this annoying screenreader just randomly starts reading stuff with a yellow highlight behind when I click any of the text and keeps scrolling up until it has finished reading. I don't need a screenreader and it seems that this is not a Fiverr feature. The problem is that this thing is only happening to me on Fiverr and not on other sites. Can someone give me a clue? Kind regards. Sannan.