Calla L.

I have bought from several sellers on Etsy, and each transaction has been perfect and ended with me having something which I could not have bought anywhere else. Several times I have bought handmade items from small businesses and each time found the seller to be keen to provide the perfect item, even when I have asked if small changes can be made for me. I have found Etsy to have the choice and convenience of online shopping, but with the personal touch of shopping locally.

As a poetry resource this site is pretty good, and it is free. The downside is that it is flooded with advertising, which seriously impairs use of the site. People who seriously want to read, post and exchange poetry comments are left frustrated.
On the downside, the trolling, doxing and abuse on there are woven into the fabric of the site, and the administrators do nothing to prevent it. During and following an extended period of trolling, posting of my private details, and threats I received no support whatsoever from admin, until I threatened them with legal action, began contacting their advertisers to inform them of the bullying and trolling with which they were associating themselves, and flooded them with complaints. After this they slowly and reluctantly began to react, but gave the impression they thought that I was the problem rather than the small group of perpetrators.
If they cannot monitor and administer the site effectively and as if they care about their members they should close the website down. Given the state of it and the rate at which people are abandoning it I feel it may close eventually anyway.

I placed an Amazon order which was to be delivered by Yodel by 4th July. On 4th the tracking was updated to say that delivery had been attempted but was unsuccessful and asked that I contact them for the delivery. I had been out for approximately 10 minutes and assumed I had been unlucky enough to have missed it in that time. I contacted Yodel to be informed that they were very busy and that no delivery had been attempted as there would be a delay. My Amazon order info was then updated to say that I had requested a different delivery date, although they are unable to give me a new date or time slot. Now I have the inconvenience of having to wait in for who knows how long or miss the actually delivery attempt. The implication of the false tracking details was that the delay was my fault rather than theirs. Obviously to deceive the person using their services into believing that they were at least attempting to meet the service for which they were being paid. Now my delivery will be late due to Yodel issues, and I am being blamed. They need to improve their business to meet promises they make, or admit when they are unable to. What they do not need to do is blame recipients of their deliveries for their incompetence.

Allpoetry is not a site for people who wish to write and read poetry. It is a site for people to connect socially, with poetry as a backdrop. It has several cliques, and if you have an issue with one person you quickly find the whole clique turns on you. It is heavily populated with stalkers and people who want who knows what kind of relationship. Certainly not one based on poetry. Many sexual predators inhabit this site (male and female), as was directly witnessed by both my partner and myself. Naked pictures were received via their internal messaging system, and a link to a pornography website left in the comment field on one of my poems. The answer given by moderators is to place an "ignore" on these people, but they have so many aliases and fake IDs it is impossible to keep them away. At the time of leaving I had almost 80 IDs on my "Ignore list". The site and the people on there have gone a very long way to contributing to my total abandonment of poetry. The only redeeming thing about this site is that it does not operate a censorship policy on poems posted, but gives the user the opportunity to filter out adult material which they may find offensive, without interfering with the creativity of writers. Maybe the issue is not with the site itself, but with the people attracted to use it to ends other than poetry. Either way I can say it is a very unpleasant place to be.