I have been using AllPoetry since 2016 and uploaded over 500 poems, held a dozen contests, and entered quite a few myself. What has 8 years of dedication given me? Absolutely nothing. The site is poorly designed and the virtual equivalent of throwing your work into a black hole. The only surefire way to have someone interact with your work is to enter a contest or be picked, seemingly by random, for the front page. And the quantity of comments by no means guarantees quality- most comments on my poems are’I liked it’’Good job’ or’It was nice’. You have to comment on two separate poems to post your own work and I have always done my best to completely read a piece, analyze it, and give sufficient feedback. No one else seems to care.
The problem is that every other site has a tiny active population, a membership fee up front, or their set up has such a high learning curve that it’s not worth the trouble. Allpoetry is plenty accessible, but apparently overly so. There’s barely any regulation regarding adult content, and I’ve even had poems be flagged for having words wrongly assumed to be dirty. Any and all complaints fall into a void. I’ve been problem solving various issues with the owner himself and he just stops responding.
It’s difficult to find any good information on the site, whether it be poetry advice or important information on how to do various tasks like turning on dark mode. And the features you can find, like the completely arbitrary, broken’rating system’- which also ranks nearly every single word in a poem by’cliche-ness’ cannot be gotten rid of. It’s supposedly a closeable pop-up, but will constantly reopen itself and impose on you a wall of text essentially saying’Your poem is bad!’ This is especially heinous on mobile, as the button to close it is at the bottom of the text, and so is every other button.
I’m done with this forsaken site. I don’t know where I’ll go, but it’s time to start exporting all my work. Goodbye, AllPoetry. I won’t miss you.