Upwork officially bans chatting outside of their chat?

Question

Upwork

Here Upwork sent a letter:

Dear Valued Upwork Member,
Upwork's community of professionals, agencies, and clients relies on the platform to deliver not just quality opportunities and matches, but also peace of mind. They expect Upwork to help protect them from fraud, intimidation, and spam. Keeping working relationships on the Upwork platform is essential in order for the safeguards we've put in place to be effective.

There are two changes we want to specifically highlight, as they may impact how you use Upwork going forward:

We are clarifying permissible modes of communication between individuals on our site to reduce unwelcome off-platform solicitation. We want to be clear that professionals and clients cannot make unsolicited contact off of the Upwork platform. While often well-intentioned, any type of outreach that bypasses our communication tools and safeguards without an explicit invitation from the other party can be perceived as unwelcome and a violation of privacy. Going forward, users who are found to be violating the privacy of other users in this way will be removed from using our service further.

Here is an offtopic about the ransom from the plantation

We are making it easier for our customers to take relationships formed on Upwork off of our platform without violating our Terms of Service with a simplified Conversion Fee. We recognize that there are situations where we facilitate very successful client and freelancer matches and, for a variety of reasons, both parties would like to continue working together outside of Upwork. While we continue to enhance our offering to ensure clients and freelancers have everything they need to work together on Upwork, we don't want to prevent our customers from working together in ways that better meet their business needs. To support these needs, we are updating our Terms of Service with a more straightforward Conversion Fee that allows users to take Upwork relationships off-platform without violating our Terms of Service. We will also be rolling out further product enhancements to support this process over the coming months.

We are committed to building a fair and equitable platform where you can find world-class talent or work opportunities in a safe and secure manner. To do so we require customers to keep all work on the platform or go through our approved Conversion process as outlined in the Terms of Service. This enables us to protect our customers with the tracking, verification, and support of all of our safety checks, as well as the ability to stand by important promises like our Payment Protection programs.

These Terms of Service updates, including other less significant changes, will come into effect on April 3, 2020.
We value your continued support and partnership to ensure that Upwork remains a safe and prosperous community where professionals and businesses continue to thrive.

Do I understand correctly that from April 3, 2020, there will be an official ban on client<->freelancer communication outside of their buggy chat? With the threat of an eternal ban.

Why buggy?

Только что попробовал получить конфиг MySQL (без каких либо паролей) my.ini. Фиг вам, ни переименовать в txt, ни заархивировать с паролем - всё бестолку. Только через емейл ушло.

Answer 1

unsolicited contact

without an explicit invitation from the other party

I understand correctly that

Formally, judging by the text - no, it is not correct. What will actually happen, we do not know.

Answer 2

Judging by the message, Asians found customer contacts outside the platform and started spamming them there, perhaps even after the project. Clients got tired of it and they wrote to upwork
Upwork reacted that any contacts without the consent of the client are
banned But how do they recognize the setup now? When will they spam but refer to another freelancer to get banned?

Answer 3

Upwork understands that clients and freelancers in some cases want to interact directly, bypassing authorized channels, so in the near future Upwork will create an environment that will provide interesting opportunities for such communications, this means that there will be integration with services like Slack, Github, Linkedin, email services and others.