Considering The Situation VI

The Fallout Effects Of Losing The Ability To Publish New Stories On Vocal

By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred Published 9 months ago • 2 min read

"Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt

Introduction

This is a further public service announcement about the situation since I was unable to publish on the 23rd of November 2025. I am publishing this using a recycled Vocal Story and will explain more below.

The music is UB40's take on Bob Marley's "Keep On Movin'", which is appropriate to how I feel on Vocal (take a listen to the lyrics).

Where I Am At 28/12/25

As recompense, Vocal has given me a year's gratis V+ membership, which I am, of course, thankful for.

However, I am still unable to publish a brand new Vocal story, so I have to find previous ones to reuse. I am trying to identify ones which have few reads, hearts and comments, and can do this with my Stats. Below is an example with three that I feel I can reuse:

Now comes the problem. The only way you can revert a story to draft is from your Stories list. Please let me know if I am missing something.

Most creators don't have 350 pages of stories to go through, but there is no search facility, so to find a story to revert to draft is a gombination in dropping into the rough time area and then page through and hope you find the story.

This is also made difficult as the paging repeats some stories, overwriting others, so you may not even see the story you are looking for. It is the same as in the Stats report, illustrated in the story below:

Now, here is the next issue. All challenge entries must be unpublished:

Because I am recycling old story shells, they will probably be considered as "published" and therefore not eligible for any challenge. I think this is probably built into the system to stop people from entering old stories, and I doubt Vocal will have the ability to allow my stories through, although if they based it on the last publication date the could do, but then Creators could do the same with any old story.

I don't know if that is affecting why I have had no Top Story for over two months, but we shall see how things go.

Conclusion

My reads are slowly rising,

So that is good.

Thank you for reading and for your support. I am just waiting for Vocal to implement their next upgrade and hopefully I can get back to normal on here.