The Vocal Situation

Introduction

Thankfully I can now publish and there are some improvement in the editor although I hate the autosave feature. When it fails and says it is saved locally you don;t know whether to trust it. As yet it has worked for me, but I do save an offline copy just in case.

I can't see the oint of the character count, Vocal base certain communities on number of words, but we know Vocal love pouring effort into pointless system additions.

More Observations

The first is that every story I have published since the upgrade have no reads, in fact I have no reads in July. I don't know if this is true for fully validated users too. Would love to hear from you in the comments.

I am hoping that they are working on the Stats reporting and fix the problems that have plagued it since I started of Vocal. This si one of the places I documented it.

This worries me because if the read figures are not being recorded then will we be paide for them, normally I bring in a $2.50 a week, not a great deal, but iit does eventually add up. Although because I cannot connect to Stripe via Vocal I cannot request a withdrawal from my wallet. This is what I get in my wallet (I have blanked the numbers):

I think removing payments for non V+ users is just wrong. These users being traffic to Vocal, some a lot, but they cannot afford the ten dollars a month for V+. I don't know if a one dollar a month subsciption call maybe V*,with maybe a 0.2c pay per read would be acceptable to most free users.

The editor has lost the ability to simply paste images in, which was an excellent part of the old editor. The unsaved changes always worries me.

The lack of communication from Vocal and Justin is worrying. We know they can put a banner up (like they did telling us about the upgrade and Justin's post about the upgrade, but it seems disturbingly quiet at the moment.

There are still people who cannot even publish, and they are paying a subscription, that is something else that is not acceptable. They could share old stories in the Facebook groups, but people want to create and share new stories.

Conclusion

So while I am thankful for meing able to publish, I believe we should have a daily announcement about the state of things. Maybe a bullet list like:

• Verification - Keep trying to use that, we are looking into why it is failing for so many people

• Save Errors - We are not sure what is appening here - under investigation

• Tickets - We are putting things in train to answer withing two days and visit the ticket to see the status

• Cloudflare Issues - This is a problem with our supplier platform and we have raised it with them - we are awaiting answers

Those are a few made up examples but would be useful for Vocal to make at least a general announcement.

I know thy have a small team and have worked hard to put in a major upgrade, but whenever you do this, systems should be fully tested, especially when people are paying a subscription for it.

That is why I do not publish exclusive stories, because I would noy want to put myself under pressure to produce work becaause people were paying ME as subscription. I know V+ Creators pay their ten dollars a month and out of that they effectively pay me 0.6c when they read my work.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work by doing this.

When Vocal finally get all the issues ironed out, this really will be the best platform for all literary creators.

Thank you once more.

I included "Rise" by Public Image Limited , because we Creators and Vocal will rise, and it is a positive piece of music.