UK.Rec.Competitions Newsgroup

Mention newsgroups to any compers who have been around as long as Loquax and they'll probably fondly recall uk.rec.competitions. A newsgroup is defined by Google as "collections of related messages (also called articles) on a particular topic that are posted to a news server by users, which then distributes them to other participating servers."

uk.rec.competitions was the first big UK comping community where users shared competition posts and supported each other. Loquax originated from the newsgroup and would not have existed if it wasn't for that newsgroup. For the most part it was a good community, but like all groups it suffered from in-fighting, splits and complaints about lurkers.

Loquax itself even ran into more than a few arguments. For example when we launched our own forum - which was originally designed to complement the group - but someone got a tad annoyed by the launch and another time when a user failed to get their prize because one of the siteowner's happened to be at a funeral!

We also had a few issues with people who loved to copy our content either to their own site or to the newsgroup. They were happy days LOL!!

Fortunately it wasn't always a bunfight and there were plenty of good times, great competitions and fabulous wins!

Newsgroups unfortunately started to die out as portals and forums took hold, and now with social media they've been pushed further and further down the pecking order. The uk.rec.competitions group has changed dramatically and now seems to only have one poster and there's definitely no community spirit left.

Don't forget you can discuss competitions, share hints and tips and interact with other compers on the Loquax Discussion Boards.