I am glad to see this feature improvement, as I have responded to messages from mountaintops because I did not want to lose my gig ranking or have my response time impacted even when on vacation hiking in remote areas.
Fiverr can go one step further to better support its sellers by offering an extended window of unavailability for sellers who take parental leave. I took parental leave and spent nearly a year working hard to try to get my gig ranking back up to what it was before I went on leave. Fiverr's current practice of downranking gigs when sellers are unavailable for more than a short period of time disproportionately impacts women, but it also has a negative impact on men who choose to take parental leave.
Most people who need to take parental leave take more than 30 days, and that is a crucial time for them to be fully engaged with their newborn babies. If Fiverr allowed even a once-in-a-seller's-lifetime exception to the impact on gig rankings for people who attested to being unavailable because they were taking parental leave, it would go a long way to ensuring that parents do not bear disproportionate impacts from caring for their children at the most critical time of their lives.
A change in policy of this nature would also help foster diversity and inclusion of people who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and life circumstances that prevent them from being able to hire full-time childcare. Sellers could provide proof that they are taking parental leave by uploading a copy of their child's birth certificate.
Fiverr could go even further to offer a one-time exception as well to sellers facing extraordinary life circumstances, such as needing to undergo cancer treatment. These are the times in sellers lives when being able to care for health and have income through their Fiverr sales is more important than ever. This is the right step for businesses and society to support sellers as people, and one that is within Fiverr's power to take.
