This week a problem developed with one of my Moodle installs which runs courses on The eLearning Site. There was a problem with login and more crucially a problem with people creating new accounts. No new accounts = no new people paying for courses. I was keen to get a solution.The error was this:
—–text start—–
Server error!
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Error message:
Premature end of script headers: signup.php
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 500
courses.theelearningsite.com
Fri May 6 07:43:50 2011
Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7g mod_auth_pgsql/2.0.3
—-end text—-
I am not a programmer so I hit Google with a search. No solution was obvious and people seem to be trying different things, with not much success.

My next port of call was oDesk. I’ve not used this service before but I’d heard they were good. Creating an account was painless and in under 15 minutes I had a job posting created and live. To give me a feeling of security I wanted to employ someone who had already completed some hours on oDesk and had a high feedback score. I also required good English and skills in PHP and Moodle.
I waited for applicants.
I also needed to validate my credit card which took a couple of days. They take two payments equal to US$10 and you have to tell them what the amounts were. Once validated they pay you the $10 back.
Within 24 hours I got 3 applicants ranging from $12 to $25 and hour. The one I chose was actually the most expensive (if you can call it that) and he said he’d need 1-2 hours. I allocated him 3 for the week.
Sergey Grachyov had my problem sorted in 1:30 hours. Great value.
Now on oDesk you only pay for the hours worked (unless you do a fixed price job posting) and oDesk guarantee this as contractors have to login to oDesk , log what they are doing and oDesk actually takes a screen dump 6 times during the hour. That way you, the employer, can actually see what your employee was working on. They have the option to remove any shots of things like answering a call on Skype and can amend their hours logged accordingly.
Would I use oDesk again. Yep absolutely.
Oh and by the way, Sergey “updated “lib\recaptchalib.php” script, function recaptcha_get_html. Problem with “download_file_content” function, because it never returned a result”.