Issues With Vocal That May Never Be Resolved

Prologue To Problems With Vocal

This is not hitting out at Vocal, and often there are other companies who will not acknowledge issues. Also because of the number of stories I have now published I hit problems that most people will never actually encounter, but they are still issues. I am hoping that Vocal look at this post and say “Hmmm that is a problem, we really need to do something about it” but here is the first hurdle to anything happening.

First Contact With Vocal Over An Issue

This is true for almost any company. You have the first point of contact and they look at the problem and they might have the ability to help you or actually resolve your problem, and that is good. I used to work for a mobile phone company and the customer services representatives were on the end of a phone and they had to follow a defined script often making it impossible to resolve the caller's problem.

If the first contact they sometimes escalate it and then it often disappears. I have also reported a number of problems regarding plagiarism, hate posts and technical issues (more of which will be down below). In the past, I have tried to follow up on my queries with no response, but if the first contact has received nothing from the escalated problem what can they do? Ideally, they should respond with the fact they are still waiting or it’s out of their hands now but a zero response is not good.

Technical Issue One - The Vocal Search

This was so hit and miss that I ended up creating my own directory stories so I could find my own stories to share with people. My problem is that with over five hundred stories it is difficult for me or anyone else to find a particular story of mine. While I sent a few emails about the fact that Search was not working properly I never received an acknowledgement.

However on your profile, you can now filter by community which is a help on your own stories but the community filter does not apply to the overall Vocal search, so some things Vocal does can help us. This has made me a bit lapse in updating my directories, although that may be also things that are happening in my life at the moment.

Incidentally, when I created my first directory it kept failing to save, but I had an excellent dialogue with Vocal Support and they couldn’t fix it but we came to the conclusion that adding the links in was bursting the capacity of a Vocal post, so I resolved it by splitting my directions into Overall, Poetry and Music. The Overall directory is below and is one of my most-read posts.

Technical Issue Two - Repeat Stories In Stats

I would love to be able to select a story and see how many reads and hearts it has, but the only way we can do that is by looking at the stats list, and here is my problem. I have over five hundred stories and many have the same number of reads as others, especially at the lower end. However, each page of stats (and I have over fifty) seems to be extracted separately which means that stories can appear twice or more times, while other stories don’t appear at all because they are effectively overwritten by the repeated stories. This could be rectified by ensuring that the full extract was referenced each time, but I doubt this will be looked into.

The Never Ending Music has 50 reads but appears on two separate pages so is taking the place of another story with 50 reads, but I am unaware of what that is.



Conclusion

As I have said before the Vocal platform is a work in progress and has a lot of faults, but is simple to use and great as a writing depository. I feel that Vocal does not value their subscribers properly continually taking ideas without acknowledging the source and chasing and favouring “established” writers over Vocal members, but that is Vocal’s prerogative, maybe they will change but in the end, it’s about attracting readers and sponsors and money and that, unfortunately, is the endgame for any business.