This guy hires people from freelance web sites to write web sites for him. Typically the coders are absolutely terrible and the code is thrown together from other projects. When I was brought on board to one of his projects, he was working on an adbrite clone that needed to be recoded from scratch. It was completely nonfunctional, even the mathematics behind calculating clicks was incorrect.
The database aspects weren't any better, were extremely slow, and so forth. I told him that it needed to be recoded from scratch, but he said it was behind. It turned out all of his projects were always behind, and he constantly lied to his customers.
Here are my main complaints about him and his projects:
1) No template system, each PHP file had its own layout so he could "easily change anything he wanted", but that defeated the purpose of PHP for the most part
2) Every layout had to work with IE5 for Mac, because he refused to upgrade, even though it was 10 years out of date and didn't support basic functions like ajax, so don't expect having anything web 2.0 from him.
3) There's no security in the code, and any I tried to put in was often shot down as being too complex. Even the CAPTCHA which is meant to stop bots used image files with the names of the numbers it tested against, so it was unbelievably easy to exploit.
4) The database schema had no indexes and his queries did not use LIMIT and he just SELECT *, and would even change it to this after I wrote proper queries.
5) No CSS or JS allowed - everything had to be in the file it was in, even if it was used 100 times, it'd be on 100 pages.
6) Banking information was stored in plaintext in the database
7) As per the adbrite clone, among its countless other problems, it didn't log clicks, so people could click as many times as they wanted.
A) When saving clicks/views, no IP addresses were saved, so basically a person could click on an ad as much as they wanted and there was no limitations on how that was calculated
B) He required that all of his sites, including this one, have built in systems for managing banner ads.in this one the banner ad system had to be completely separate from the one we were building, so we had to basically do the same thing twice. The second time 'round the old programmers did an even worse job.
C) Tax calculation didn't work. It didn't matter what information the customer put in about taxes, it was simply never calculated.
D) A shopping cart system was built for "buying" ads for your site. If you were a publisher that is, you would go through all ads that advertisers put on the site and selected which ones you wanted. No categories, no tags, nothing, just page after page of ads.
E) He didn't allow customers to change any code, at all, or take suggestions from them. Zend encoder pretty much guaranteed that the average customer wouldn't be making any changes to the site. All member updates, price changes, etc were emailed to him.
F) There was a file for each and every function in most cases. For example in the administration area the "FAQ's" manager as he called it (because apparently FAQ isn't already plural and it's taking ownership of something) there was a file for listing FAQ questions/answers and so forth: faq.php, faq_add.php, faq_delete.php, faq_edit.php, faq_update.php
G) There was no version tracking or anything, there was an FTP server on the boss' computer, and everything had to be edited that way.
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Despite all of this, he sold it with a $8,000 price tag and blamed customers when the code didn't work. He was an abusive employer and I only made $100 from working on that adbrite clone. I tried to leave peacefully and did not give him a bad review (i didn't give him one at all) on the freelance site he hired me from, but a few months later, out of the blue, he decided to write a scathing one about me, making bizarre claims about me wanting to steal his terrible code.
Simply put: he's a scam artist, don't buy from him and don't work for him, ever.
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