Category: Ramblings

2010 was going to be a fabulous year for me. After winning the Petra Joy Award in Berlin in October 2009, I had big plans to make more erotic films including a feature. I had planned to travel to the US to make the movie and do more business there. I was also going to do a lot more with For The Girls and maybe get a book organised.

And yet here I am nearing the end of July 2010 and none of that has happened. Instead, I’ve been mostly sitting in my office, completely stymied, feeling angry and helpless and incredibly frustrated.

There is one major reason for this: a bunch of rip off artists called Multistream

In November last year we hired this company to revamp the member’s area of For The Girls. Seven months later, the job is still not done and we are having to start all over again.

A bit of background: Jane and I started For The Girls in 2003 and designed the whole site using simple html with a few includes. Seven years later, it’s still pretty much the same. We add all the galleries, movies, articles and stories by hand and it can be very time consuming. Knowing a change was long overdue, we put out a call to find someone who could create a content management system (CMS) for FTG which would automate tasks like gallery building and movie conversion as well as make the site more interactive. We were also keen for a nice new, snazzy look.

Because FTG has been around for a long time, there’s a lot of content in the member’s area. A LOT of content. We’re talking thousands of photos and movies and over 1000 individual articles. We wanted someone who could take our existing written content and put it into a database so the new CMS could use it.

We put out a call on the webmaster boards and Multistream stepped up and said they could do it. Article database? No problem, they said. CMS? Easy. We’ll just adapt Joomla for you. Vast amount of content? Sure, we’ll transfer it all over for you. We were promised a completely updated new member’s area with all content ready to go. All for the bargain price of $3000.

So we hired them, paid them a $1500 deposit and eagerly awaited the delivery of our new member’s area. We’d hoped we could launch the site on January 1 but given it was Christmas, figured it would be done by the start of February.

How to best sum up the subsequent seven months of lies, obfuscation, frustration and endless waiting? As you can probably guess, there’s a lot to tell. I have pages and pages of emails, including very lengthy ones written by me asking, demanding, pleading and often swearing, trying to get some kind of a result. A few highlights of the whole saga:

* ************, who runs Multistream, repeatedly promised me the site would be done “by tomorrow” or “by this afternoon” or “by Friday.” I counted back and she actually made this promise a total of 19 times. (Fool me once… Well, yes. I’m obviously some kind of idiot for putting up with that many lies.)

* In late January I asked why nothing had happened. After repeated emails, Multistream told me they’d were unable to automate our article database and were subsequently doing it by hand. Turns out that the article database doesn’t exist and never did.

* In late February they said the site was ready to go and we just needed to give them the final payment to finish it. So, stupidly, I paid them. The site was actually nowhere near ready.

* In late March, after more delays, they finally told us there was a problem getting the CMS to work with our existing server. We tried to troubleshoot the problem and then managed to set up a new server for them after a couple of weeks. Ever since then ************ has used the problem with the host as their excuse for not doing the work as promised.

* From April they had unfettered access to the new host with all our content transferred over. Nothing got done.

* Throughout May and June I sent demands that the work be done. More promises with very little progress. In mid June I started threatening to take this public and to tell other webmasters not to hire them. That got them moving, at least. A few changes were made… and then nothing.

* I have been making repeated demands for a refund since May. They refuse.

* These people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever encountered. Days and weeks go by without replies. There was one point where they didn’t reply to any of my repeated emails for three weeks. And then they said it was because there’d been some kind of email glitch. Funny, but they always seemed to get the emails when I said I was going public with my problems.

Start of July I left a very, VERY angry message on their answering machine. Suddenly, the emails worked again and work was being done. It looked like we might finally, finally, get a finished CMS.

Alas, no. They disappeared again. Barely a tenth of our content has been added to the site and I haven’t heard from them since the 12th July.

They seem to think the job is done. It’s not. What we have is a nice-looking site with almost nothing on it, no further information on how to work it and a company who is not interested in fixing the semi-working CMS they’ve created.

I have been threatening to take this public since May; this is overdue. The reason I held back is because the threat to ruin their reputation seemed to work for a while. But I’m over it. This farce has gone on for long enough. Now we just have to walk away from the whole sorry affair and start again.

It hurts to be financially ripped off but that’s not the real problem. For me, it’s the complete and utter waste of seven months of my time – time that I could have used doing something useful and positive. Instead I’ve been sitting here waiting for this thing to be finished.

I’ve got so many things that I want to do with FTG. Unfortunately I decided I’d put off any changes until we had the new member’s area up and running; it felt like I’d be duplicating work otherwise. So I’ve been spinning my wheels, frittering away my time on a few side projects, wasting time on Twitter and Facebook and waiting. Waiting for “tomorrow”, for “this afternoon”, for “this Friday”. It’s pretty easy to lose half your life waiting for someone else like that, especially when you expect things to be done in the near future.

It’s been very hard for me. I would lie awake at night composing angry emails to these people, trying to work out how to make them do what we’d hired them to do. At one point I went to bed for several days, crying because everything seemed pointless. I’ve had to delay travel and delay my plans to make the film because I felt I had to clear up this mess before moving on to other things. I had every intention of spending the summer in the Northern Hemisphere; instead I’m here, cold in my office as the sun dips below the horizon.

And I do wonder if I’m the most gullible person in the world. Surely I should have known better than to let it all drag on for so long? The problem was that they kept saying they were working on it. And I’d get a bit here, a bit there… the hope was always dangling in front of me that maybe, just maybe, it really would be done by Friday. Maybe we hadn’t wasted all this time and money and we could move on with our lives. It was always just there, over the horizon, if only I’d be patient and give them a bit more time…

And while ************ have been untruthful and uncommunicative, I suspect they’re not really scammers. It’s just that they’re massively incompetent. They took on a job that they didn’t really know how to do and then they wouldn’t front up and be honest about it. If only they’d said: “Sorry, we can’t do this after all, here’s your money back,” then we could have been spared this disaster. But no. Instead they’ve lied, ignored me, treated me with contempt, wasted my time and, ultimately, not done the work they were paid to do.

So, Google spider, chew on this please: ************ and the parent company ************ ripped us off. Do not hire them. Do not use them for any design or programming work. They are dishonest and have treated us very badly. Do not hire or work with ************.

I will be posting a full timeline of this saga on a blogspot blog. It details every email and every broken promise. ************ will say that it’s our fault for expecting too much, or the fault of the host, or any one of the myriad of excuses I’ve been given. None of them wash anymore.

The fact remains: we paid ************ $3000 to create a new member’s area for For The Girls with all our content ready to go. They have not delivered it after seven months. We have been ripped off. There’s no other way to look at it.

So there it is. The full sad and sorry saga. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 19 times over 7 months and the story goes up all over the internet. Fair’s fair.

Yes ************, it turns out that you really do value your reputation at $3 grand.

Update: 9.40pm Friday night. The company has contacted me offering a partial refund. I have therefore redacted their name from this post. If they don’t come through with the refund, it goes back up as originally posted.

I’m not going to delete this post. It expresses the stress and frustration I’ve experienced for 7 months. Getting a refund does not compensate me for my lost time and lost opportunities. No amount of money will make up for that.

Update 23rd August: The designers have contacted me and said that unknown persons are making threats via email on my behalf. Let me state unequivocally that I have nothing to do with this, I do not know who these people are and I’d very much like them to stop. It is not helping. I am still waiting on most of this refund but I do not need shit like this getting in the way. I also have no control over any other webpages that my link to this post or who have reproduced my original Tweets on the topic. I also have no desire to make threats to this company or the people involved. I simply want my money back.

Update 23rd December 2010: I still haven’t received the refund they offered me. I got a paltry $150 via paypal and that was it. I’ve been meaning to get back to them but it has felt like I’d be making myself stressed again for no real gain. I will contact them in the New Year and make a final demand for a refund. Then their name goes back on the post.