Problems

Introduction

This is just a short piece on problems I am encountering when creating Vocal stories.

I have raised tickets but there is no way of tracking them and I have received no response (which is usual) so I thought I would document it it a Vocal article.

I suppose it is a critique and I know it won't go down well because it points out issues with Vocal.

Maybe they are working on it, and maybe it will suddenly get fixed, but as usual, we are left out in the cold, uninformed.

Problems

I tend to write my stories in the Vocal editor because despite its drawbacks (fonts, colour and justification). You may just say that I am lazy and that I should go back to using an external editor and then use the Vocal editor to assemble and publish. You know that I am the laziest Vocal creator though.

I often write my stories over a period of time, which means leaving it in draft and going back when I want to continue.

Recently, when I go into drafts it takes an age to show my draft stories, and one of these is a forthcoming challenge so it is important to me.

As often as not I get this:

That requires a page refresh and sometimes it does this two or three times before finally giving me my stories.

When we start our stories in the Vocal Editor if we don't save (and the initial tave takes and age, which I can live with), it then does an auto-save, but it's what the story was about a minute ago so anything you have written gets wiped.

While I know auto-save is an option I haven't a clue why they have it set up the way they have. It should only have if you have been writing for maybe ten minutes and not done a save yourself. It should be an option.

One annoying side effect is that it makes extra saves of the document you are working on. The image below shows two copies of a published story plus the draft of my next challenge piece. Those first two drafts should not have been created.

So when you go to delete them you get a red circle and have to refresh the page to remove the item.

Recently there were about eight on my drafts page. You can only remove them one at a time and they take a while to remove. When I was removing the spurious drafts I also removed my forthcoming challenge draft.

That was my fault but caused by the fault in the editor that is causing the spurious copies.

Luckily my challenges have a set form, and the graphics and links I needed were stored on my computer so it did not take long to recreate, but it was still a chore to redo. So that will drop on February 1st.

Conclusion

NOTE: The Draft stories delay seems to have been fixed now. Whether Vocal saw this, or read my ticket, I don't know.

I have not heard of any creators having these problems, but I doubt I am the only one.

If these issues are affecting you let me and Vocal know by raising a ticket or emailing them at [email protected]

You can raise a ticket here:

I still think that the vocal Platform is the best one for sharing our creative work, and usually, they do get problems sorted, so I expect that this will be sorted, but they still have done nothing about the stats which I documented here

Thank you for reading this and if you are having similar issues I hope that this has helped you a little,

The music I included is "Problems" by the Everly Brothers.