Impact Analysis

Introduction

Yesterday I found I had been blocked from Vocal. It was a shock. Fiona had been blocked too and she was the first to bring it up. Obviously, this put me in a difficult position as I am unlikely to be able to post my two thousandth story if I am blocked from Vocal.

This was doubly odd as Justin had picked up my issue with Vocal Resource submissions and my second submission has been taken on as a Vocal Resource and given a Top Story (I thought I had seen my last Vocal Top Story) but this is the one.

So Did I Panic?

Imposter Syndrome always makes you feel you are the one who has done something wrong, and I do get a lot of flak for my writing but most of it I dismiss and always take on constructive criticism.

I looked at the situation and first of all, asked if anyone else had this issue. I got a no, so it was only me and Fiona that I knew of.

I also posted on Discord and then started further investigation into the situation.

Most of my working life has been involved with designing, testing, and implementing systems on many platforms. Everything in life has points of failure and it is up to the ones who work on those things to make sure they do not fail and if they do to have a fallback operation to take care of it.

The simplest of systems can have points of failure and this situation made me look at it from two directions and where this could have failed. Had something I had done changed something?

I was trying to access Vocal via my computer which is hardwired into the Virgin Network. I also have a Virgin Router and a secondary network router. That then goes through a browser, via Cloudflare to connect with Vocal.

I checked my phone and Kindle (which connect via wifi), and they were both failing, I then thought although my broadband provider is Virgin, but phone provider is EE so I switched off wifi, tried to connect via my phone and it worked, no problem.

The problem was Cloudflare rejecting my Virgin IP connection.

Vocal was recently halted by a Denial Of Service attack and they may have implemented protection that may have caused me to be blocked. I don't know if that is true, but we can see the importance of Impact Analysis here.

The problem here is that Vocal has to trust Cloudflare and Cloudflare has to deal with millions of ISPs many of whom will be untrustworthy, and if Virgin's credentials are similar to untrustworthy addresses that could explain the situation.

The thing is we tend to just buy things and implement them based on sales blurb rather than what they are made to do.

In an unrelated subject, a lot of DAB Radio stations are moving to DAB+ and therefore cannot be received by normal DAB radios meaning that customers either have to buy a new radio or revert to FM if they still have it. I don't if the Impact Analysis here posited that new DAB Radio sales would be boosted. I have just reverted to FM, as Steely Dan said "No Static At All" (that's a lie).

So I am accessing Vocal via a non-Virgin connection, and I hope that it will be resolved soon. I am sure that I cannot be the only Virgin Vocal Creator.

Conclusion

The fact that I managed to write this shows that I found a way around the problem, but finding a way around is not fixing it. This is out of my hands and hopefully Vocal, Cloudflare, or Virgin can come up with a solution.

The music is "Can We Fix It?" by Bob The Builder, I am sure we can.