·:[ GreenEye Wire ]:·
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I have never, in my life, cursed more before 6 in the morning than I have this morning. Dear God, E-lance is frustrating to use. E-lance, for those of you living under a rock, is a web site that allows web contractors to bid on projects.

Last month, I found a team on e-lance to work on my project. They worked out well, so this month, I wanted to extend their project to be an on-going thing. After searching through their help system, I could not find a way to do this, so I contacted the help desk via phone to have them help me out. I will say one good thing was my help desk call was *not* routed to India. OK, that is one plus for e-lance.

She informed me that it was not possible for the project manager to extend a project, that only the service provider could do that. In order for me to extend the project, I’d have to create a new project with no deadline. Apparently, e-lance doesn’t see that project managers should be able to control their own projects. Um. OK.

So, with her on the phone helping me out, I created a new project and, in order to have the one company I wanted to work with get the bid, I had to invite only them to bid.

One problem, the company I wanted to work with was in the database multiple times. I was told this was normal, that this was the only way one company could get work in more than one category. I held my tongue, but obviously their database administrator doesn’t know what they are doing. So, figuring it wouldn’t matter which “company instance” I chose, I picked one at random. This was not a clear process, and literally had to have the lady on the phone walk me through each step because I simply couldn’t find the things I was supposed to click.

Just to make sure things were all kosher and good, I sent an email directly to my team telling them to accept my bid so we could move on with things.

In a chat this morning, my team told me they didn’t receive the bid. I looked in the e-lance system and say that, yes, the bid went out. Apparently, however, my team was not able to bid on the project unless I picked the specific instance of company that would allow them to bid. For some reason, service providers, since they are in the system more than once, can only bid using one listing of their company, even though the e-lance system forces them to be in the database multiple times. So, if you do not pick the correct listing, they cannot bid.

So the only way to fix this problem was to delete my newly created project and create another project, this time in a different category WITH the correct company instance so my team could bid.

Unbelievable.