Pheelycs, I am sorry I questioned the odd reference to Chacha by WB... I think I now understand. Your summation of the various anatomical maladies and dysfunctions outlined above was superb!

I must admit, I never expected such a gentle request to illicit such a...ah, wide variety of responses. This, in of itself, has made the effort worth the entertainment.

I recognize that certain emotions do not come across well in text, but it seems that many of your postings on this thread are tinged with too much paranoia and an underlying threatening or angry tone, which seemed both unnecessary and unfounded based on my posting. What I think of as irrational responses to a polite request. That, and I'm not really sure what this meant at all:

"Fracturegang appears to be chacha's mentally impaired brother."

Even if the choice of the word 'rational' may not have been the optimal way to describe your postings, all I was trying to say is that your previous posting was, thankfully, somewhat less aggressive and I appreciated the change of tone so that we can discuss the topic at hand in civility. That's all.

No one is playing games, WB. I responded to the commercial comment already and don't feel the need to go in circles. 98% of the people on this forum are engaged in commercial activity related to freelance writing in one way or another, so I don't see why my engaging in commercial activities makes this some special case. johnsmith has made a couple, albeit polite, yet direct insinuations that he, you and WRT have some specific entity in mind who I am allegedly representing. No one has said what exactly that means, so I cannot really address the issue.

Who I represent is me and a couple of freelance writing friends and a computer programmer, none of whom have any experience running or operating any commercial essay company as seems to be the accusation. Our aims are to, hopefully, build a better system that will not only profit me, but whoever choses to participate. I do appreciate that you have finally taken a more rational and conversational tone and, as long as we can remain reasonable I am happy to continue to address questions as best I can.

I have taken great pains to demonstrate that I am 'in the minority', as you say, by sticking around here to address any and all reasonable concerns. As I currently earn my living writing for companies who might not take kindly to one of their writers trying to peel away the stranglehold a few dubious entities have over a large portion of the industry, it completely behooves me to remain relatively anonymous. I assure you if I told you who I was you would have no idea, since I really am just a freelance writer with the hope of making something better for me and other honest writers. Since companies I do work for monitor this site I think most people still reading this thread would understand my reluctance to publicly disclose my name. I do have to eat, after all.

You have harshly stated that I will "discover the relevance of [your] opinion" once you 'discover' my domain. I have seen your investigative abilities in the past and do not doubt them. I also currently operate no commercial websites that have been or are in operation, which is why I welcome whatever investigation you wish to undertake. Because I know you have uncovered solid details of other businesses in the past I feel certain that your inability to actually find any domain I operate (for lack of one) will simply bolster my case.

Absence of evidence is, indeed, evidence of absence, in this situation.

Amazing. I have been completely honest and straight forward about my intentions as I can be. I won't pander myself down to whatever bizarre paranoid delusions of grandeur seem to have infected certain members of this thread.

AsianWriter, as you can see from my above postings, I agree with your opinion of WB's other arguments against certain sites, so I am as baffled as you are. My occasional perusal of this site has shown that, while WB has an apparently erratic temperament, she also is usually well informed. So, I am sorry to see that she now insists upon whatever theory is apparently so obvious to the three posters in question, but not at all obvious to me. In any case, since *I* know I cannot possibly represent whatever entity some people seem to think, I fully accept WritersBeware's unilateral challenge. It would be a bit more fair to at least know who I am accused of being, but either way...

I am also sad to see that such a simple, one time call for writers to take a very brief survey has somehow been turned into a circus of odd accusations.

WritersBeware. As I already stated above, I sent a message directly to the forum admin with a link to this thread asking them to delete it if they found it was in violation of the TOU. Given that was three or four days ago and the thread is still here I can only assume it is not. In any case, unless you are a forum admin or moderator I don't see that your opinion on the matter is really relevant.

FReynolds, et al.

Posting results might be a good idea. I'm certainly open to it, but I'll have to talk to the rest of my colleagues. I'll at least post the tally of what percent of respondents say that freelance essay writing is primarily: A source of beer money!

You might be surprised.

A big thanks to those of you who took the time to respond (to the survey and this thread). Everyone's input has been (mostly) enlightening and much appreciated.

Well, in the sake of fairness I just messaged the Admin specifically regarding my post and asked him or her to review, if they have time. I suspect that this forum receives many such requests...

Personally, I don't see how asking writers to volunteer to answer questions about their experience in freelance writing once could be a problem, but I will certainly defer to the Admin's judgment without complaint.

Until then, I don't see any reason to go in circles about what constitutes 'spam'.

I'm certainly happy to discuss anything else of merit though!

Now now... WritersBeware, we aren't asking you to pay for the electricity consumed in your 3,953 posts. I can give you my address if you'd care to send me a check though.

johnsmith, I bathed just this morning!

As I have freely said, I personally emailed a number of service providers and freelance writing sites once and only once requesting kindly a few minutes of their time to answer this survey or another one that contains questions more pertinent to essay service providers. I sincerely hope that no one has taken to forwarding any personal communication of mine, but I also don't see anything wrong with asking someone to take a survey. Whatever I smell of it is probably just my dinner...

WritersBeware. As I have followed this forum for some time I have appreciated your ability to be critical while also providing useful data on potential scam sites that we all have come to know and love. I certainly admit to having personally sent one time emails to both essay service providers, as well as posting on various forums. In cases where forums specifically bar any sort of promotional postings I have simply written an email to the admin asking them to post for me if they feel the survey is appropriate. I consider spam, which we all love so dearly, to be inappropriate and blind, mass-sending of unsolicited information or advertisement. As I have posted this request to one single thread under General Discussions and taken the time to personally respond as best I can I leave it to the rest of the readers to decide if this is spam or not.

You have certainly done a thorough job acting as watchdog on certain sites and, at least in the cases I have seen, provided some apparently credible evidence to back up your vociferous postings. I only ask that you give me the same consideration.

To answer your specific concerns. I have stated clearly that we are developing our system, hence the market survey. This is common practice. As we are under development, I think all rational readers of this forum can understand that we are not going to provide a link to a site under construction, as that would be counter to our aims. I also made no claim to be a non-commercial entity. I assume you are also a working for-profit as an essay writer and, therefore, commercial. If, by posting this request, I have violated some explicit terms of service I will gladly, personally write to the site Admin for approval, clarification of those terms, or to otherwise remove my posting.

If you have any other concerns I will be happy to address them with you in a reasonable fashion.

WritersBeware:

Yes, the survey is 100% free.

Well, to be honest, as I was hoping to explain above, we are developing systems and tools to help the whole industry and those systems are under construction. Because things are in the developmental stage, I am not really able to answer any specific questions at this time about future practices or services.

For those that are interested, however, we will obviously be posting here and elsewhere about our system when it goes live in the near future. We will also personally contact those who volunteer their email addresses at the end of the survey.

I appreciate the interest and wish I was able to be more specific.

One can aspire!