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I think most of them just skim the description and bid on a lot of projects without really reading them and hope to get some of them awarded. Being non-native English speakers compounds the problem.

Or am I being too gentle? It's hard to miss the title if you know what it means.

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You've got it right. Derek Sivers recommends doing this for any serious rentacoder/vworker/getacoder projects you post:

""" At the end of your post, write something like, “VERY IMPORTANT: To separate you from the spammers, please write I AM REAL as the first line of your bid. We will delete all bids that do not start with this phrase, since most bidders never read the requirements. Thank you for being one who does.” """

This doesn't really work all the time, as some of them are skimming through the description for this sort of stuff.

Of course it's not a sufficient criterion by itself; Sivers' point was that a lot of them won't even do this, so you can at least save yourself the trouble of evaluating them.

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