Crash, Boom, Bam ... Elance Is at It Again

"No functionality, no money!" (Those who are fans of Frosty will get the connection; my apologies to the rest of you.) It's just never-ending headaches over at Elance these days. Yesterday, I logged in to post a repeat project with a client I gained through the site. (As part of Elance's terms of service, you are obligated to bill future projects through the site for a period of one year, but almost no one follows this rule ... except for me, that is.)

So, I click the approve button and all I see is a spinning icon for minutes upon minutes. Tons of time already wasted on what should have been a quick and painless task, I surf over to the Water Cooler to complain and discover that someone else is also having this problem and he's already put in a help ticket that's gone unanswered.

Obviously I'm not going to be getting any help from Elance (not that I ever do), so I add to the thread. A couple hours later, another service provider, not an Elance CS rep, mind you, responds: "Ran into the same problem myself just now, so I called Elance. The tech asked me what browser I'm using (IE7). She said there shouldn't be a problem if I'm using IE7. She asked me if I had popup blockers (yes). Told me to disable them, which I did. I then logged out of Elance, logged back in, made another attempt to submit a repeat project ... and still wasn't able to.

Recalled reading a thread in the Writers forum about using the Firefox browser to access Elance. Didn't really want to have to go there, but wanted to get the new project set up, so I downloaded Firefox, logged back into Elance and was able to very quickly submit my repeat project.

Then I wanted to come here to let you two know that you might want to consider downloading Firefox ... and I couldn't submit a reply to your post still in Firefox ...."

Bless her soul for going through all that trouble to fork over transaction fees to Elance, but NO! Screw that!

Me: "Thanks for the advice, XXX, but there's NO WAY I'm going through that much trouble to post a repeat project. Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser and Elance should support it. If Elance doesn't want my transaction fees, I'll be more than happy to keep them."

Late yesterday afternoon, Elance's Rachel offered this useless advice: "We are aware of this issue. Our engineers have made this a priority and are working hard to fix it. In the meantime, to avoid violating our policy on moving business off Elance, please ask your buyer to post an invite-only project for the work that needs to be completed. While we know this isn't our normal process, it can serve as a short-term workaround until we resolve the issue."

Me: "Nice of you to offer a solution that will cost us another Connect, Rachel, when a Repeat Project won't. Sometimes I think you create these issues for us just so you can suck more money out of us."

Rachel now assures us that the problem has been fixed. I'm still thinking I should break the TOS and take the project outside Elance. I think I'm more than entitled to given the run-around I have to endure there. Screw you, Elance!