Freelance Security News

A number of users of the site have been requesting alternatives to Paypal for countries where Paypal is not convenient, and so we’re now able to offer (and receive) payments via Moneybookers, which is especially popular in Europe. Moneybookers works in a similar fashion to Paypal but offers more bank and payment options, so if you’re looking for an alternative please take a look.

Well it’s been a while since we had to write on this blog, but there’s nothing better than server downtime to kick us out of our slumber.

About a week ago we started to see emails from Freelance Security being bounced back as our server was, apparently, blacklisted for spamming. It turns out that it wasn’t our fault at all (we don’t spam!), but a neighbouring IP address had been spamming away like there’s no tomorrow, and the whole “Class C” IP address range (for you techies) has been listed on spamhaus.org, which is fairly outrageous especially as, according to our web host, they were not even responding to emails requesting that our server be removed. So the only answer was to change the IP addresses on our server.

Of course, despite being an apparently simple task, it didn’t go completely smoothly, and so we experienced some downtime for the web site and email, so you may not have received the usual notifications. Apologies for that, and please contact support if your emails are still not materializing.

Since Freelance Security started in 2004, we’ve generally offered payments through Paypal or via bank wire. Paypal is by far the most convenient method of receiving payments from Freelance Security, as payments are processed within 24 hours and can be deposited straight to your bank account in many countries, with no charge from us. We encourage all consultants to use Paypal if available to you for use with your Freelance Account, and all Paypal users should ensure that they verify their accounts as we reserve the right to reject payments to unverified Paypal accounts.

Bank wires have proven popular with consultants in countries where Paypal is not available, however for these we have to charge a processing fee and the funds can take some time to arrive. With immediate effect, we will only be offering bank wire facilities to our Certified Consultants, although we will also make certification free so that more consultants can make use of the facility. We need to do this to ensure we do all we can to battle potential fraud.

We’re also looking into other payment methods for those consultants who are unable to use Paypal. We have recently introduced payments via e-gold, again for Certified Consultants only. E-Gold allows you to instantly receive your payments in the form of electronic gold which you can then convert to cash, and have deposited to your bank account, with any of the various e-gold exchange firms which operate around the world. For more details, please see www.e-gold.com.

We’d be happy to hear any other suggestions as to payment methods you would like to see. Primarily, we’d like to hear about Paypal equivalents around the world that you would actually like to use in your dealings with Freelance, so please email us at support@freelancesecurity.com if you have any good ideas.

A large number of our members like to keep up with new private investigation projects on the site either by email or RSS. RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication”, allows you to receive updates as they happen to a web page such as My Yahoo, MSN or Netvibes, to a modern web browser like Firefox, or to a dedicated RSS reader application such as NewsGator. The main advantage of RSS is that the user receives timely updates as new projects appear, without having to add to his / her inbox overload. A good beginner’s primer on RSS can be found on the BBC website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm.

For those who prefer updates by email, Freelance Security currently provides the ability to subscribe to email project updates through a user’s account settings. However we’re currently working on transferring all email subscriptions to a third party system provided by Feedburner, the service which also manages our RSS feeds. This change will allow for easier subscribing to or unsubscribing from the email updates, better formatted emails and easy ability to switch between email and RSS. In fact, we’re already using Feedburner on this news blog, so give it a try by using the links on the right hand side. We’ll let everyone know when we’re ready to convert project emails to the new format, and until then, good luck with the bidding!