Goodfella - left me high and broke

rtr2006

Active member
A few months ago I posted in the Custom Service/Development requests section of this website (link). Essentially I was looking someone to build some custom mods for me. I have an Alabama Football website and I wanted to add a recruiting section.

After speaking with a few people - even some by phone - @Goodfella reached out to me via private message. We spoke on the phone and he really seemed to grasp what I was looking to do. He said with the help of @Bob's mods he could do this for me. Basically we would utilize 3 of Bob's mods and he would customize one of them to be a fully working recruiting database.

I agreed w/ him on pricing, which was $1,500 up front and $500 upon completition with a 30 day time frame.

The initial work was slow, with him doing most of the work on a test site somewhere. About 2 weeks after I paid the money, things started to happen on the website. Progress was being made. About a week later it stopped completely. I reached out to Sal and he said his wife was in the hospital and he thought once she got out we needed spend about 4 hours together on the phone so he could show me what we needed to finish up. I agreed, told him I was sorry his wife was sick and that I was looking forward to spending time with him showing me what he had done and what we needed to do to complete the website.

A week goes by and I message him that I never heard back. A few days later I get a private message that his wife decided to take him on a trip to Egypt and he has no computer charger. That was the last I ever heard from him.

Now I know he's been active on other sites, and other users have confirmed this for me. But I am out $1,500 and left with a website that doesn't do what I need it to do.

This isn't a bashing thread. This isn't intended to throw shade at someone. This is just the honest truth and I don't want someone to make the same mistakes that I made. I vetted Goodfella out with 2 different people who said they would trust him. And I'm not even mad at those two people - as this is the internet and things happens. I'm just sad I lost the money and still don't have what I need with no additional capital to throw back at it. It's been more than 2 months now, and even after politely emailing, calling, private messaging and texting. I've never heard back from him.

I've been in contact with my lawyer and at this point, we're proceeding in filing charges to recoup my money. I'm obtaining all of my phone, text, email and private messaging records for him. It will cost me more money to have this litigated than what I gave him, no doubt, but at this point it's about principle.

Anyways, hope everyone has a great day and weekend.
 
Out of curiosity: what was the scope of your project and what were you trying to achieve with the add-ons?

Essentially a big database where we could input potential football players, where they were thinking about going to school, what their ESPN ranking is etc... it's kind of like this but not as in depth.
 
Thanks for the heads-up and sorry this happened to you. It's likely it wasn't intentionally malicious, he probably just took on more than he could deliver or his circumstances changed. I agree he should give you a refund if he can't deliver. I hope you guys signed a contract in advance.
 
I'd also for future reference recommend to anyone avoid doing a 75% payment up front. I work off a 50% payment up front but have also delivered every single project I've ever committed too over the years. You could even set some milestones for a really large project paying out 25% at the start, milestone 1 and 2 and completion. I know this doesn't help you now and I hope @Goodfella comes through with the project or a refund.
 
I'd also for future reference recommend to anyone avoid doing a 75% payment up front. I work off a 50% payment up front but have also delivered every single project I've ever committed too over the years. You could even set some milestones for a really large project paying out 25% at the start, milestone 1 and 2 and completion. I know this doesn't help you now and I hope @Goodfella comes through with the project or a refund.

This is dang good advice. He wanted the entire project up front and $1,500 was all I was comfortable giving. That equated to about 65% of the total amount agreed upon.
 
I also don't understand why this thread was moved, as it is clearly not off topic, it is directly involved with 3rd party services, hence quote:
Third-party services & offers
This forum is to be used for announcing and discussing XenForo-related services

About your situation, I can't comment on if he scammed you or not, but I can say that you managed your whole start pretty bad.

What I mean is that you shouldn't have trusted 1.5k bucks in first place to someone who clearly is not a developer. Normal members can at best guide you in setting up and configuring existing addons and some can work with templates, but this doesn't make you a dev.
If you needed custom mods as you say, you needed to hire a developer to do this and frankly with a budget of 2k you should have found somebody more skilled AND with a portfolio (like existing addons).
I am not sure what kind of modifications you needed. For a theme, there are 4-5 good theme-creators with excellent reviews.
For custom styling, there are plenty of users in the third-party services who can modify the forum as you want, and all with reviews.
And for custom mods as in addons or scripts, the same.
Why did you go with someone without his own review thread?

Anyway, to your current project.
Can you tell us what you mean by this:
fully working recruiting database.
If you can explain what you want to have, we can guide you and tell you which existing addons/features could help you out and what you need custom made.
 
I also don't understand why this thread was moved, as it is clearly not off topic, it is directly involved with 3rd party services, hence quote:

About your situation, I can't comment on if he scammed you or not, but I can say that you managed your whole start pretty bad.

What I mean is that you shouldn't have trusted 1.5k bucks in first place to someone who clearly is not a developer. Normal members can at best guide you in setting up and configuring existing addons and some can work with templates, but this doesn't make you a dev.
If you needed custom mods as you say, you needed to hire a developer to do this and frankly with a budget of 2k you should have found somebody more skilled AND with a portfolio (like existing addons).
I am not sure what kind of modifications you needed. For a theme, there are 4-5 good theme-creators with excellent reviews.
For custom styling, there are plenty of users in the third-party services who can modify the forum as you want, and all with reviews.
And for custom mods as in addons or scripts, the same.
Why did you go with someone without his own review thread?

Anyway, to your current project.
Can you tell us what you mean by this:

If you can explain what you want to have, we can guide you and tell you which existing addons/features could help you out and what you need custom made.

Obviously looking back, I would say that I did miss-manage the entire thing. That's what I get though. I did vet him out a little bit, but that's neither here nor there.

What I was looking for is a way to build a database full of people. They are high school football players getting ready to be recruited by a college. I wanted to be able to list each recruit, what position they play, what 40-yard dash time they run and many other details, and then list the schools the recruit was interested in visiting. In addition, I wanted members to be able to vote to what school they thought the kid would commit to play for.

It's difficult to explain... but would look something like this
1526060740850.webp
 
Does the resource manager have custom fields? Maybe you could just make all of the data a custom field and make each player a resource in the XF resource manager?
 
It's difficult to explain... but would look something like this
I see. I remember @tajhay having this kind stuff and when I searched for his thread I see that you already posted in this thread, which means you already looked up his website, which does have this.

I think he did all this by using @Bob 's amazing addon "Showcase", which sadly only exist for XF1 right now.
But you can kind of build this by using normal forum threads + custom fields which are by default integrated in XF2. Obviously a bit more plain, but would do the work. So for what did you need 2k budget? :)
 
Does the resource manager have custom fields? Maybe you could just make all of the data a custom field and make each player a resource in the XF resource manager?

I'm honestly not sure, which is why I wanted to hire someone. I'm not great at any of this stuff.

Doens't @Bob's showcase pretty much allow this out of the box?

Let's not involve Bob, he's already involved and I feel bad enough for that part. Thought I had done everything by the book.
 
I see. I remember @tajhay having this kind stuff and when I searched for his thread I see that you already posted in this thread, which means you already looked up his website, which does have this.

I think he did all this by using @Bob 's amazin addon, which sadly only exist for XF1 right now.
But you can kind of build this by using normal forum threads + custom fields which are by default integrated in XF2. Obviously a bit more plain, but would do the work.

I contacted him and he said he wrote all of the code for his. I can't verify that, I have no clue.
 
I'm honestly not sure, which is why I wanted to hire someone. I'm not great at any of this stuff.

Let's not involve Bob, he's already involved and I feel bad enough for that part. Thought I had done everything by the book.

I meant more that it seems like you could achieve what you want with his addon already without paying someone £2k to do it.
 
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