I was informed by a freelancer friend of mine who I know at a forum (let’s call him Job) that his favorite freelance website, rentacoder.com, seemed to have installed some new logic into the functioning of the site. Job says that after having posted applications to two projects he thought were worth bidding on (and to which the respective buyers responded right away with interest), he was surprised to find an unfriendly blank page on any rentacoder page he tried to visit, with the following message:

Ouch, you are hurting our servers!

You were hitting the site from your IP Address of 64.40.121.17 at a rate faster than comprehensible by a human at 85 hits per minute for 42 minutes. If allowed to continue, it would cause our servers to crash and be unavailable to other users. Please slow it down!

Some causes of this problem are:

1) Using a download accelerator program (such as Download Accelerator) or automated retrieval program (such as ‘Get Right’). These programs may speed up access to small sites, but on large sites like this one, with so many people trying to use them, they cause server outages.

2) Turning off caching in your browser (which causes it reload every image on every page…taxing the servers)

3) Plain old browsing too quickly…

If this is your first warning…this page will disappear in 24 hours. Users who continue to violate this rule will be permanently banned from the site. Thanks for your cooperation in keeping the site available for everyone.

Job tells me that he didn’t do anything to cause the above message to appear. So far, he’s been unable to access the rentacoder website for the past four days. He’s been unable to get back to the the two potential clients and projects he was trying to win. So it’s Job’s loss somehow without him being at fault about any of this. He says that he’s tried emailing rentacoder support many times to look into the matter so that he could continue his work, but he hasn’t gotten any response at all.

Apparently, rentacoder’s trying to save up on bandwidth costs by reducing access to dubious behavior on their site. Well and good, one might think, since it’s pretty easy to have robots and spiders created online conveniently these days at, well, freelance sites like rentacoder, and most of these crawlers done in the cheap are up to no good by indiscriminately scraping somebody else’s hard gained content. From the looks of the message above, rentacoder was simply trying to regulate such nefarious activities.

But my freelance buddy Job also tells me that he gets his internet service from a provider that allots common ip addresses to its users. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it could easily have been somebody else accessing rentacoder who happens to be in the same network that Job is accessing the internet from. If Job has an active rentacoder account and does freelance work at rentacoder, and Job being the competent programmer that he is, knowing that it’s not proper to hit somebody else’s website like what the error message is saying above, Job wouldn’t possibly put his own rentacoder freelance account at risk by doing something unacceptable for rentacoder now, would he.

Assuming that my logic here is sound, this leads me to think: who’s doing the programming at rentacoder.com? What with the sophistication of this well known freelance site, how inane is it to put in place a very simplistic way of conserving bandwidth resources. The guy who did this seems to think that each and every user trying to access a web page on the internet has his own unique ip address. That kind of programming work leads me to think that the guy just learned to write some code yesterday, most probably from reading one of those free downloadable [Learn Internet Programming in 2 Hours for Dodos] ebooks in pdf.

And to think that rentacoder.com has more than a hundred thousand registered programmers and providers, can’t they hire somebody who could implement a better anti-leech/anti-crawler system? I know a couple of amateur web programmers who can code better than this! Or maybe rentacoder’s trying to save bandwidth is only one indicator of how hard times may be getting these days. Perhaps rentacoder’s also scrimping on hiring better talent to boost its own web based service as well.

Tough luck, Job. There are only two possible solutions I can think of that I can offer for your current problem:

- Use a proxy service.

- Find a better freelance site to join.

I’ve been told that rentacoder charges very high commission rates compared to other freelance job sites. And since it’s the freelancers/providers who fuel revenues for freelance job sites such as rentacoder, maybe it’s not really worth Job’s time and effort to put up with lousy service like this.