Howdy, Vikings. It’s time for another update.
First of all, we want to thank everyone who has gone to a lot of trouble to keep their Local Viking accounts up and running. We realize that we’ve asked you to wade into serious nerd territory by asking for things like API keys and DNS records. The amount of appreciation we have for everyone who has been willing to put in some leg work is difficult for us to put into words.
We aren’t blind to everyone’s frustration. We see the Facebook posts and we have been regularly staying up till 2 AM to close out support tickets. We don’t say this to invite your pity. At the end of the day, our users pay us for a service and right now we are scrambling to provide it.
We do have a plan though. If you’re a user who has applied for a private instance of Local Viking, you should have received an email with instructions about how to proceed. If you have not received this email, check your spam folder. We have sent instructions to everyone who submitted a request at this link: https://localviking.com/private_instance_requests/new
The revamping of our platform has created several distinct camps of users. Some of you have been approved for API keys and properly set your CNAME records and are effectively ready to go. We’ve been in touch with some of you and will be in touch with the rest of you shortly.
There are others who have been approved for an API key, and set CNAME records for their subdomains, but those records have not yet been finalized. This happens. Different domain registrars move at different speeds. Having a wealth of recent experience in this arena, we can state that records set via Cloudflare or through Google DNS get pushed to the wider internet quickly–often the same day they’re set. Records set elsewhere take longer. It is not abnormal for someone to set a record through a cpanel interface and have to wait around for days before that record can be looked up and confirmed. In these cases, it makes sense to contact your hosting provider or domain registrar’s support team and ask what can be done to expedite the process.
Another set of users have applied for an API key and gotten turned down. Hang tight. We are keeping track of you and we will be in touch with further direction.
Most worrisome are the people who have submitted their information for a private instance but have not heard anything. Just this morning, we received an email from a user who said that he applied for a private instance on Sunday but has not received any communications in the meantime. We have been updating a spreadsheet of every request we have received and sending those users emails with instructions on how to proceed. These emails should be coming from team@localviking.com. Check your spam folder for an email from us if you have not seen the instructions we’re talking about in your inbox.
We are doing everything we can to get everyone set up with an individual instance of Local Viking. Forgive us if the onboarding process hasn’t been as smooth as it could have been. We did not foresee our API getting disconnected by a capricious tech giant, and therefore did not have a contingency plan laying around. We’ve had to improvise here and there. The solution we came up with allows us to keep everyone on our team on board and it allows us to continue providing services at reasonable prices that you’d get gouged for elsewhere.
We realize that it’s been over a week since you could last use certain features like post scheduling and reporting. The good news is that our new implementation is functional and we are already successfully setting up the initial applicants.
What we politely ask of you is to please, please not take it as a sign of disrespect if we aren’t able to instantly reply to your support requests. As you might imagine, we’re getting more than usual these days. We value everyone who has surveyed the field of GMB management options and chosen to spend money with Local Viking. Please know that none of you are taken for granted.
Rank tracking and GeoGrid searches have continued to function the way they are supposed to throughout this ordeal. Soon enough, we will have everyone up and running on their own, individual versions of Local Viking. We’re very much looking forward to that and we’re quite happy to have every willing user along for the ride.