When did I become a paying ProZ member? February 22, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Translation Sites.trackback
I googled “Dear Client” today and clicked on the third hit, which was the ProZ Blue Board listing. I learned something very interesting while submitting my non-payment report to the Blue Board. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I somehow became a paying member of ProZ in December 2011. This is news to me. I never authorized a payment to them. Consider me gobsmacked. They must be really desperate to inflate their member numbers if they are adding members without receiving payment from those said members. Anyone care to offer any insight because I would never knowingly become a paid member.
Musings from an overworked translator 
The obvious first step would be to check with ProZ support. I can see a number of benign reasons (such as winning a free membership) to some scary ones that should be checked out immediately (such as identity theft).
Winning a free membership? Well, the former ModZ had to serve 5 or 6 years for one year free membership. I don´t think you can win a free membership without having served the W-House for some time.
Identity theft? Pretty unlikely. Well-known translators experience such things for their uniqueness by no means.
Glitch in the system? Try logging in and checking it again in a day or two to see if you’re still a “paying” member.
I unwittingly became a paid member (free for one year) when I participated in a group buy, which I had not expected to happen. Did you perchance buy something through the site?
Aha! Yes, I did, Sarah. I bought MemoQ last August. The mystery is solved! Thank you!
Oh, so Proz offer CAT tools discounts? It’s not all bad then. 🙂
Yes, I wrote about the group buys a few months ago. I do see some value to ProZ, but they also do a lot wrong. And unfortunately most of the time the bad outweighs the good.
Yes – totally agree. In a lull (very rare in my case) and moment of boredom I had a surf on proz to see what was going on. I suggested a translation for a word. To put it in a nutshell, I proposed getting rid of the noun (nouns abound in German when we would use verbs) and replacing it with a sentence instead. I received several replies to this, one clearly quite narked (as we British would say) suggesting I should stop “using street slang”. Well I’m glad we’ve cleared that one up. I thought street slang was something rappers used! This was the point I suggested silence was golden and anyway I had better things to do than engage in an e-mail ping-pong. But things like the blue board are a good idea and might help vulnerable people from getting conned.
I was a paid member for one year twice, but didn’t derive any benefit. I mean no potential clients’ requests at all. It seems that buying a membership is just one step out of many and you still need to invest a lot of time in your profile and your standing within the community. I think it’s useful to bear this in mind when considering buying the membership.
My point is that I didn’t buy a membership and would never buy a membership, which is why I was surprised to see I have one. Turns out I got one automatically when I bought MemoQ in a group buy last August.