This is by far the best, most comprehensive and quality php marketplace script in the world. I am extremely impressed by its functionality and rich features. Here are some of my ideas to help the brilliant developers to improve it further. I will be updating this thread on a regular basis.
25 October 2019 – Version 1.4.1
Once a user is banned, all the alerts re spam words should disappear from the system: the user is gone, we don’t care and we don’t want to know anything about them!
We MUST have the system issue automatic invoices to clients following their purchase. We should have an invoice tab in the admin area where we can enter relevant company details and personalise invoices with our branding. A buyer should have a table of all their transactions and invoices. This is a BIG MUST. Almost everyone ordering will be a business and businesses NEED invoices.
24 October 2019 – Version 1.4.1
The pop up notifications of proposal approvals and receipt of new messages need to disappear from the screen much sooner. They do not disappear and I have to close them manually. Maybe we can increase the speed at which they fade out as this is very disruptive when corresponding with people.
There is no option for withdrawing a custom offer sent via a chat.
The proposal reviews are arranged in a chronological order. It would be more helpful if we had the latest reviews at the top and not the bottom.
All sellers and buyers are listed as online despite them being offline. We should have an option to detect online and offline sellers since this can be misleading and annoying to people. I fI write to a person and get no response whilst I can see that they are online, this could adversely impact on the sales of a seller. I would also add the local time of a person and indicate whether it is day or night time where they are because it helps to manage expectations in terms of replies to messages / work delivery.
Under the admin panel, we should have an option to enable, disable and customise 1) custom pop up banners and 2) header and footer banners. We should be able to add text to the pop up / banners, add hyperlinks, add buttons with custom text and hyperlinks. This is great for advertising discount codes and special offers as well as making announcements.
Under the admin panel requests section, we should have an ability to search for proposals via 1) KEYWORDS 2) SELLER NAME. Otherwise, going through each proposal by hand takes too long, especially when we are looking for a reported proposal.
We should have a warning section for users. Under that section, we could have a list of all users and a search box. Once we click on a user, we could have a messaging pane where we can send out a message to the user. We could have predefined templates for spam words and other stuff. We should also keep track on how many warning a user has. We could have a box with “Ban user for X days after X warnings” or “Ban user permanently and remove account and all proposals”. This would be a better way to manage misbehaving users.
Under the support requests section on the admin panel, when we open a support request, we should have a message composer that would allow us to send a message to the user to let them know on the status of their request. Right now, all we can do is close the ticket without informing the user on the outcome. Also, you could add buttons for closing requests.
I recommend that for languages and restricted keywords, you add one single pane where a user can enter the language and restricted keywords in one place without having to click on add new each time. Also, it would be great to have a button to upload languages and restricted keywords from a notepad file. It would make life so much easier.
The restricted keywords function is not working too well. It is flagging up convos that do not have spam keywords. Here is an example below.
We need to have some sort of a character count limit (reasonable) since it is possible to spam the hell out of the title length and we do not want that. We should have something reasonable.
When creating a user profile, it is very time consuming to find the language via the dropdown list. Can we have the same free input box as for the country: the user starts typing and the system throws out the choices. It is much quicker than having to go through an unorganised dropdown list.
I recommend that the latest messages come at the top in the personal messaging area. Right now, even the latest messages can be at their original place. It is causing me a real nightmare because I cannot tell what messages are NEW and which are old. It would be logical to have the latest messages at the top in a slightly different colour to indicate that they are new.
There is an issue with user attachments. When a user attaches a file, a certain error is displayed.
22 October 2019 – Version 1.4.1
When I am creating a proposal and try to upload an image, the image upload pop up flashes many times and nothing happens. When I refresh the page, it allows me to upload an image. I sense that there may be some sort of a bug there.
18 October 2019 – Version 1.4.1
Inside the admin panel, when I am reviewing all the proposals submitted for approval, when I click on preview, I am taken to the home page inside a new tab.
There is a bug in the requests section inside the admin panel. The buttons to preview, approve or reject are not visible.
11 October 2019
The action buttons in the buyers’ requests area disappeared and all I can see are coloured lines. The theme has started playing up without me doing any changes whatsoever.
4 October 2019 – Cannot Create Proposals
I do not know what happened but I am no longer able to create a proposal via the home page and profile page links. See the video below.
.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }
3 October 2019 – Comments and Ideas for Improvement
It would be a good idea to add Google captcha on the registration page, when posting proposals and logging in. I am getting a lot of spam, 300 spam users with spammy emails have registered on the freelance site. You could add an option to add google captcha keys and allow the admin to decide where to activate the captcha by using tick boxes.
URGENT
The messages inside the personal messaging area cut off which in my view needs an urgent fix!
I had another great idea which I will add to my forum thread: create an option to sell a digital download, in which case the delivery will be automatic and the buyer will NOT need to wait for the seller to respond. Also, this will help to avoid chargebacks and late deliveries because the buyer will be able to download the digital products right away. For example, such products could include software, email lists and B2B databases, ebooks, guides, video tutorials, etc.
29 September 2019 – Comments and Ideas for Improvement
When searching for a service and clicking on something from the drop down list, I get a message ” The page or user you searched for is no longer available.”. If I enter a keyword and click on search and then click on the service, all works fine. However, if I click on an item inside the search dropdown menu, I get the error messages that the page / user is no longer available. Seems like a bug to me.
When viewing a proposal/service, it would be a good idea to add a “share service” button which would open a pop up with social media options and would also have an option to copy the link of the service/proposal.
Here is the example wording:
“Reach More Customers
You got the talent, now go viral. Share your Gig on Social Media to connect with new customers and get more orders
Share Your Gig”
The video upload option does not seem to be working properly as I am unable to upload a video.
27 September 2019 – Comments and Ideas for Improvement
Is it possible to add ALL LANGUAGES and ALL COUNTRIES because so far we only have about 5 countries and 5 languages.
Add a section in the admin panel for a site wide banner that can appear at the top of the screen with a message for the people. This is good for important as well as promotional messages.
Do not auto approve edited proposals because it is dangerous as users can add backlinks and inappropriate content. Every time a user edits their proposal, the proposal should go back to the moderation queue.
Instead of allowing users to add restricted keywords one by one, we should allow them to add many words in one go with the help of separators i.e. commas word 1, word 2, word 3. It will save a lot of time from having to add each restricted keyword one-by-one.
The same goes for skills tags. There are way too many tags for skills to possibly add to a predefined list. Whilst we can have our own list, we should give users the flexibility to add their own tags for their skills and then we can review them and decide whether to approve or not approve.
When asking a user to edit their proposal, we should create a sub menu under the users section that will enable admin to create custom messages that they can use as templates i.e. these messages would load into the text box when a user selects from a drop down list their predefined messages. The admin can further edit that message. I think this would be helpful.
We need to have a section for invoices where the admin can add all the company details and logos and the system would automatically generate an invoice for the buyer automatically and allow them to download it in PDF in their member’s area. Most buyers will be businesses and every business needs an invoice. This is a real must.
Proposal text editor – I would remove the option to add backlinks as most users will abuse it and try to cloak their backlinks in hidden text i.e. by removing formatting so that the admin will not be able to spot a backlink. This is a common black hat tactic of spamming forums and hiding the hyperlink by turning it into normal text.
I would not allow users to use a different fonts because the site has to have a sense of consistency.
It would be a good idea to have a panel where we can customise the messages that will be sent to users i.e. confirmation email, order cancelled, order place plus send an invoice in a pdf format, you have received a new message, order delivered, etc.
I would add a security center where we can track all the IPs as well as require a seller to verify their account by providing their ID. We should have an option to ask a seller to verify their ID which would send a message to them and also restrict their account if ID is not provided in X number of days. Verification is usually required after the admin receives spam complaints or reports. A grey header banner should also appear asking the seller to verify their ID. The problem with many freelance sites is that a lot of sellers create duplicate accounts and provide the same service which can taint the reputation of a freelance site. When banning a user, we should also have a box for entering a message of why their account was banned. In the security center I would add an ability to ban IP addresses and also have a list of seller accounts and notify me from which IPs they were accessed. Sometimes, sellers with many accounts will use the same IP address so if multiple accounts are being accessed from the same IP, we can ban those accounts. I think that the security settings are very important. The system should have a way of identifying and notifying the admin when multiple accounts are being accessed from the same IP.
We could add an option for SMS account verification.
Users may receive a warning to their account for violations of our Terms of Service or any user misconduct reported to our Trust and Safety team. A warning will be sent to the user’s email address and will be displayed for such user on the Site. Warnings do not limit account activity, but can lead to your account losing seller statuses or becoming permanently disabled based on the severity of the violation.
We should have an option to limit the total number of proposals a user may post. This will have different options for different seller levels. When creating a proposal, we should limit the total number of characters in “Proposal Title” and restrict certain symbols.
I would add a search option in the reviews admin panel drop down list because scrolling through the entire list can be time consuming when there are many users. Simple keyword search would be great. Buyers should be given an opportunity to reply to reviews as it is important that they give their side of the story. Maybe the sellers should have seller ratings.
We could also have a feature for publicly sharing delivered work to give other buyers examples. This would be optional as some work is confidential. THings like logos and designs are fine.
Message notifications are not showing. When someone sends a message, we should see a pop up notification as well as a red number by the message icon in the top menu.
When an order is delivered it says that the ordred will be marked as complete after 1 day despite me selecting 3 days. This needs to be reflected on the website. If I enter 3 days for auto delivery then that needs to be stated on the website.
Coming back to my point about invoices, under a buyer’s orders tab, the system should automatically generate an invoice in a pdf format with order number, description, date amount and our company details. Under the admin panel, we should have a section for invoices where we can view all issued invoices as well as personalise the template for each invoice: company name, address, tel, website, vat number, company registration number, logo, headline, our fee, etc.
When a buyer wants to cancel an order by asking the admin to cancel it, in the admin panel I do not get a notification for the cancellation request. I have to view all active orders. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a separate tab for cancellation requests as it would be difficult to find cancellation requests by going through every order.
In the admin panel, when a user has used banned keywords (user has used some spam words in conversation.) there is no option to warn them. Add a field with a template message that the admin can edit with a macro for user’s name. We can also add a field which will tell us how many warnings a user has so that we can decide whether to ban them.
When a buyer places an order but does not submit their requirements, the seller should be told that they are awaiting the requirements. There should be a message that “Your order will start as soon as the buyer has sent you your requirements. Click here to remind the buyer to submit their requirements”.
We should also have one tab in the admin area that will allow us to create a pop up with our customised graphics, text and button links. THis is good for promotions and information.
It would also be a good idea to add an xml sitemap.
It would be a cool thing to have labels next to new categories or subcategories. It is a small thing that can really make an impression on a buyer. It shows that a marketplace is expanding. I would add a field for a label for each category and subcategory and allow user to enter free text: i.e. popular, new, hot, etc!
The theme doesn’t display notification bubbles for unread messages. New conversation is nowhere marked as read/new/unread. I guess, it will be better if you fix that. Visiting sweatyquid.com directly and not sweatyquid.com/index is not loading the website and throwing the “too many redirects” error.
Inside the personal chat, the sender’s message is cut off. There must be some sort of a bug.
