I had a customer who wanted me to stay on as a consultant to keep their system running. He was a scumbag so I added a test to see if I had logged on in the last 60 days. If not it threw a random error code. It triggered three times before I told him that I wanted a lump sum payment and I would fix it for good and then we were done and I wanted the cheque drawn on his personal account. His controller was an even bigger scumbag than he was. He gave me the cheque and asked me what was wrong. I explained and he laughed because he was a multi-millionaire car dealer and I was a late teens computer kid and I got the better of him.
The fade should be slow and subtle. At first the client thinks they are just imagining it, but then they start getting customer support calls about the site being faded, and their bosses are pointing it out too in meetings, and as it happens more and more the panic really begins to set in.
Finally they reach out to you in a desperation when there’s barely anything left of the site and ask you to urgently fix the problem, and you just shrug your shoulders sympathetically and explain it’s happening because they haven’t paid - but not like in a way that suggests you are doing it on purpose, but a way where it’s simply an unavoidable natural consequence, like if you didn’t pay your electricity bill your power would get cut and the site is slowly “dying” and fading away because of that.
They’d pay so fast.
You don’t say that, you say they are on credit hold and you won’t do any more work until your past work is paid for, after they pay you say credit has been rescinded and they have to prepay for any more work to be done.
Especially if you randomize the fade within a given range over time.
For added theatrics, after they pay you can slowly fade the site back in over a few days too, as if websites need bill money the same way humans need food, and it is slowly getting better after “being starved”
Make the fade only apply 25% (or maybe a percentage range) of the time at first, slowly increase how often and how intense the opacity is. lol
Or, make it fade more and more for each “unique” visitor. Make sure it hits after they start their marketing campaign.
You automate that shit, you never give them direct access to the source code, and you obfuscate the code that changes the opacity so that it’s really hard to find even if they manage to wrest control away from you. I did this once after the client failed to pay as agreed. They narrowly escaped their site being replaced with a message saying they did not pay their bill, by paying eventually, but I couldn’t let them get away with that shit if they decided to change passwords and tried to screw me completely.
Bury it six JavaScript and 2 php scripts deep so it is a pain in the ass to find.
Nice idea, is there a way to make it invisible ?
Not that I know of. In the end you are editing the browser rendering parameters. Anyone can inspect the page and see that the opacity on the page is being turned down. Finding where it is happening is the only thing you can really make hard. Have a couple of the pass through scripts be machine generated and you can have it use nonsensical variable names and a bunch of dummies that lead on wild goose chases. It could all be fixable, but you can make it a pain in the ass. Add a redundancy or two and it will make debugging a nightmare because even if one is fixed, the others will make it look as though it has not.
The real answer is to have NEVER do freelance web development inside the client’s firewall. Never. If they try to require it, walk away. If it is inside their firewall then they can just take the source code and stiff you. If they try to spout some BS about security, say that is precisely what you are concerned about and point blank ask them what safeguards they are willing to allow you to put in place for developing in their system. If the answer is none, walk. If they are willing to let you VPN in, run the code from a local copy over the VPN and node lock it so if someone attempts to serve it from another machine it fails.
Apologies. I’m tired and hate businesses taking advantage of “Independent Contractors”.
You obfuscate your code with random dead ends and weird variable names.
I obfuscate my code just by writing normally because I haven’t learned how to write properly.
straightens tie
We are not the same
