Phenomenal Cosmic Power!...

[KatherineB]

Seraph, You do know that stockpiling WMDs is illegal... , Don't you?

Not if nobody knows about them.

[wolfie]

SC: Hi, so you did my site about three years ago, and I forgot to pay my hosting fees like right after that, and they deleted everything after a year of nonpayment. Now, I've decided to start my site back up again, and you'll need to reinstall it.

Seraph: Ok, can I get your email, and I will send the invoice for the reinstallation costs shortly. Once that's taken care of, we will get you up and running asap!

SC: No, I already paid once for the work, I'm not paying again

Seraph: So, you expect the labor done for a second time, free?

SC: Yes, exactly

Seraph: Work is work, we will still have to put in the hours again to get your site back up, and we have to be paid for said time. Unfortunately, there will not be any free work for this.

An analogy: Someone gets custom artwork for the side of their vehicle. They get it printed up on vinyl (like the graphics you see on the sides of some semis), and applied to the door. After a few months, their car gets sideswiped, and after it's fixed they need a new decal printed and applied. Do they need to pay for that, even though they already paid for the artwork? Damn right they do.

Note: custom airbrushing would need to be completely redone from scratch. With the decal, the original artwork still exists, so it's a simple (and less expensive) reprint and re-apply. Still involves cost for time and materials (just like Seraph would still have the files she created, so it would be cheaper than the first time which involved creating the files, but she still needs to be paid for the time involved in re-installing the files.

[Mytical]

^^ Unfortunately that makes sense. And we all know that anything that makes sense is not allowed for SC's/EW's.

[TheTigress]

People like that are exactly why I choose to stick to doing my art commissions on sites like Fur Affinity and only do outside commissions for friends or family. It doesn't pay as much but the clients are never that problematic.

It seems that people who come for website designs are the worst when it comes to wanting to rip/scam designers off and get everything for nothing. But it's always a really nice situation to be in where you can tell them to buzz off without worrying about your finances when they start to pull that on you.

[Argabarga]

It seems that people who come for website designs are the worst when it comes to wanting to rip/scam designers off and get everything for nothing.

It's almost as if they genuinely feel that when you are a programmer, you really haven't "made" anything physical, so they don't see why they should have to pay for something that they can't pick up and walk off with...... because you didn't really "do" anything of substance, and, well, if you did, ANYONE could have done that! It's not like you needed SKILL to just arrange some 1's and 0's

Yeah, if it's so easy, YOU DO IT pal.

[earl colby pottinger]

It gets worse if you are willing to do free work.

I made my living for over 30 years as a business computer programmer (inventory, accounts receivable, etc) and later as a computer repair technician, I even wrote and maintained my own website on building liquid fuel rockets.

But I never wrote a commercial website before. While out of work a couple years ago I offered a friend to write him a website for FREE to advertise his store and all the uniforms he stocked! Reasons I did it, to get practice before charging people for my services, to find out how hard it was to do, and to get a proper idea on how much work it was.

So I got a basic framework up and working, he loved it. However, I just had eight(8) pictures plus cations/pricing up. So I told him we needed to now photograph each and every uniform he wanted on the site, and he need to supply *ALL* the info for each uniform.

Two days later and over a hundred uniforms he started whining about the time and effort. I pointed out I knew nothing about his produce so he needed to give me all the info and he had over thousand different items so it was going to take a couple of weeks to enter it all. More whining then he quit giving the info I needed.

Guess what, no website and a couple of months (about 10) later no store! Yet at the time the nearest uniform store was over thirty(30) kilometers away. He had a huge market that did not know he existed, the other store did have website and is doing well to this day despite the fact that two other uniform stores have now moved into the area.

My guess, once people found them they did not bother to look for a new store since they only buy once or twice a year. If he had his website up he probably would have those customers at-least and still be in business today.

Even a free website requires the owner to put work into it, the info inside does not magically appear - but that is some people think computers work. There is nothing more silly than someone declaring they are going to be bigger than Google but don't want to put in the time/money/data that even Google needed to do when they very first started.
PS. I don't mind not being paid nor having a website for him, it taught me what to look for and demand of people who later approached me about make a website for them.

[Silent-Hunter]

Programming is hard, but of course SCs would be too stupid to know that. Someone should make them take lessons in writing machine code, that'll teach em!

[Chromatix]

Unfortunately, at some point there's such a huge gap in competence that it becomes *more* difficult to perceive. Sort of wood-for-trees difficult, or like a flaming white-hot gigantic ball of gas that happens to be a thousand lightyears distant and thus almost invisible to the naked eye.

You could probably walk them, step by step, through writing a simple "hello world" program, and they would promptly take that as evidence that they can do it and therefore writing the next version of Microsoft Office is easy so why haven't you done it already you lazy scumbag?