Here we go again Vocal
Not another Cyberman attack?
This following poem was originally published in Poets. I have changed community to Writers to avoid giving confusing messages to my readers. I am also deleting some of my past moans about Vocal outages.
VOCAL STATUS UPDATE: 09/09/2025
- Just tried various ways of accessing Vocal-hosted pages of mine and other creators' work. Seems to be taking 15 seconds to get through the sticky mire of additional security measures implemented by Vocal. That's around 14.5s more than any reader is likely to wait. So don't be suprised if prospective readers give up on you.
- Embedded links to other Vocal pages in existing pages getting lost and showing errors of one sort or another. Attempted to fix this by adding a "?" as recommended by Vocal tech. This no longer appears to be working and when I tried produced the following error: "Iframely could not fetch the given URL. The page appears to be private, requiring a login, or does not allow robots."
Latest update: 09/05/2025
Just deleted the social media posts linked to the new story rather than annoy a lot of people who know me.
"Just verifying you are human" it says. Will take a few seconds.
That's another 20 readers lost in those few seconds.
By the time it is fixed the story will be out of date so no point reposting.
What does the status page say? I don't know because I can't open it.
Probably says everything is brilliant because that's all it ever says, regardless of how long it takes to open a page. What does it matter after the first 0.5s delay? That's what loses the reader.
THE ORIGINAL COMPLAINT IN VERSE
Here we go again!
Just posted a story for a local Facebook Group
And the link is being blocked by
The latest 'temporary' firewall
Tripped up yet again
In my attempt to get some traffic
From another place to this place
Won't bother checking the status page
Because we know that tells us
Everything except
What the status is
Wouldn't it be good
If nobody bothered reading our stories then
We wouldn't get so frustrated at
Our attempts to get noticed
Being blocked
!!!!!!!!
Dear Vocal,
If you are going to ramp up firewall restrictions because of a cyber attack please let us know so we don’t waste promotional efforts on social media until you have fixed it.
About the Creator
Raymond G. Taylor
Author living in Kent, England. Writer of short stories and poems in a wide range of genres, forms and styles. A non-fiction writer for 40+ years. Subjects include art, history, science, business, law, and the human condition.
Keep reading
More stories from Raymond G. Taylor and writers in Writers and other communities.
Backup or be damned
If nothing else, the latest bushfire incident at Vocal Media has reminded us that the platform, for that matter all online platforms, are by their nature, unstable and unsafe. Each time this has happened, we have been told that it is as a result of some kind of a cyber attack. There have been several of these incidents this year and the Vocal team is to be congratulated for being able to resolve these incidents.
By Raymond G. Taylor5 months ago in Writers
Standing While Falling
Quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche "He who wrestles long with monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Man is not destroyed by suffering, but by the meaning he makes of it."
By LUCCIAN LAYTH5 days ago in Critique
Comments (8)
I can’t even embed a link to another story from Vocal on a story for Vocal because of this stupid verification thing! 🤬
I got the verification that I'm human just as I was trying to open this story, Raymond. Also, I'm not sure how it verifies I'm human without asking me to do any human tasks or even asking me if I'm human or not. Is it now just sensing it through the screen? I know it's annoying and frustrating and on the days like this I just try to check in less and read more than I write.
A reader used to have to take the time to browse the aisles, read a few blurbs, judge some covers. I remember spending many delightful afternoons in bookstores doing just that and coming away with some classics and some real stinkers, and even feeling, after reading the latter, that I had learned something! Now, .5 seconds is all the time anyone takes before they move on... not sure this is a mark against the tech so much as the species who invented it... Nevertheless, a well-wrought series of thought, Ray!
It seems to be better now apart from it verifying me a few times. I'm so sorry for your experience Ray 🥺
Today was the first day I was 'verified' as human too
I feel your frustration. Trust me, I share it. For some context... There is currently a surge of automated traffic across the web. Many platforms are seeing the same wave of AI slop crawlers and scrapers. To keep Vocal stable and protect your content, we have raised our edge protections with Cloudflare. That triggers a brief browser check that runs a small script and sets a short-lived cookie so real readers can keep moving. We will dial things back as conditions ease. Additionally, we believe a lot of this bad traffic is coming from AI crawlers trying to scrape text to train or tune language models. I want to assure you that we are working 24/7 to keep your stories out of unauthorized training sets. We block or challenge unverified AI training crawlers, throttle bulk requests, and draw a hard line between legitimate search indexers that honor robots rules and scrapers that do not. We publish clear opt-out signals in robots.txt and headers where supported, including rules for AI-specific user agents, and we keep expanding those rules as new bots appear. When a crawler ignores the rules, we rely on reputation, fingerprinting, and behavioral signals to stop it at the edge. Again, sorry for the friction, and thank you for the empathy while we balance safety and speed.
Well said, it has just been slow for me
I've had to authenticate myself many times.