VOCAL Server or Gateway Issues

Dear Vocal,

You have expanded quickly and may not have expanded the bandwidth of your site or the bandwidth of your personnel. We all love posting our stories and interacting with our followers. The Vocal community, which is at the heart of this platform, has been instrumental in shaping its growth. Vocal has listened to the Creators and has many articles in Resources (although some are quite old).

This weekend, May 10-12, 2024) the Earth is under attack by her sun, with massive solar flares shooting at us and disrupting communications.

Creators have wondered if the Vocal site is down. Was it down? Is it down? Did the solar flares disrupt the communications? Was Vocal doing maintenance? Has a change on the site created user issues?

Some suggestions that will help the Creators, and possibly Vocal's helpdesk are below, respectfully, for your consideration:

• Please be sure to put a Maintenance warning prior and then a Maintenance message on the site when conducting it.
• Please consider adding a notation at the bottom of the "create a story" page explaining common errors upon submission (are there no common errors people receive?).
• I have experienced Bad Gateway 400, which seems to mean that something was not accepted in the transmission of the story—was the photo too large? Usually, there is a pop-up message saying that (which I truly like!).
• Pop-up messages are a fabulous way to notify us when an article doesn't conform to the guidelines. However, the pop-up about the length of fiction doesn't pertain if one selects the tag of micro-fiction; the same pertains to poetry. This community requires stories with at least 600 words. Your story might be rejected because it has not reached the minimum word count.
• Vocal was quick to allow Haikus when I brought that up, but it seems that the message about the length of poetry sometimes discourages writers from submitting a short poem. Thank you so much for allowing the shorter poetry!
• The writers on Vocal would rather be notified, if possible, over-communicated to, if need be. Creating a piece that is met with an error like Bad Gateway leaves the writer in limbo. If they leave the page, will their data be lost? Not all writers create their stories in Word and copy them into Vocal. We know that Vocal understands the efforts we put into our writing and is committed to ensuring security and continuity on the platform.
• Finally, an FAQ page that is indexed and hyperlinked to resource articles would make it easier to find information. Some articles may need updating from a year ago or longer when they were written. (That may be a huge undertaking, so I understand why it might be easier to point people to the Resource tab and Tips and Guides.)

This is meant to help and not as criticism in any way. IT Platforms are constantly changing, upgrading, and perhaps editing their coding. I am not a coder, but I was the technical expert on a hiring system; I did UAT (user acceptance testing) and assisted users with technical issues in a past profession, as well as managed issues between users and the software company.

https://vocal.media/resources/tag/creator-101

https://vocal.media/resources/tag/policy

https://vocal.media/resources/tag/tips-and-guides

#writers #vocalcreators #website #maintenance #websitecrash

And now, I am challenged to meet the 600-word minimum for this story directed to the Vocal team (and community, I hope). So, what to add? Vocal Challenges information by Justin four years ago says: If you don’t have a Vocal account yet, the first step is to create one! Or, if you have a free Vocal account but you want to enter a challenge that’s only open to Vocal+ creators, you’ll need to become a Vocal+ member to enter. It’s only $9.99 a month to become a member, and you can cancel at any time—no commitments.

Now I've reached the word count limit. I hope the solar flares don't interfere with submitting this!