Happy New Year! We’re just 325 days away – at time of writing – from doing Advents all over again. We hope that you found our advent lists useful, including the new additions, and that some of you managed to pick up a prize or two. There have been some nice advent wins added in The Winners Post which are great to see. Whilst compers were busy battling Instagram issues the biggest problem we found with advents was that they’ve mutated into all sorts of variants. In the early days it was simply 24 days and 24 prizes. Now we have 12 days, but they’re not 12 consecutive days, and they might run weekly or for a few days here and few days there. Oh and that not all of them start on the 1st. Let’s have an advent half way through the month or kick it off just before Christmas. Despite all that we hopefully managed to list a good chunk of the available competitions and prize draws and that our filters and tracking set-up made the whole process a lot simpler. We did attract quite a big crowd for the first few days of advent which was good. Visitor numbers have dropped down since the 1st December but overall more and more people are visiting us on a regular basis.
Your Loquax Year In Numbers
Hopefully by now you’ve all caught up with the new feature we added at the start of 2025. Inspired by Spotify’s year wrapped feature we decided to do something based on user comping and forum activity. So we created Your Loquax Comping Summary. We even brought a few old duck friends out of retirement. The summary is just a fun breakdown of the comps you marked as ‘entered’, the posts you made and competitions shared. We felt that it was a more interesting way to say “thank you” to you guys for your support over the last 12 months. Although we do sit on a mountain of data we rarely look at it but it was fascinating to see that there’s an average of 180 new competition links posted on Loquax every day of the year. That’s 5400 a month or 66000 a year! That’s not bad for free, although people still do complain. For a hobby which often pats itself on the back for supporting businesses through viral advertising and also being happy to share, it’s weird then seeing people suggesting that comping is best when you seek out low entry competitions to squirrel away for yourself. That doesn’t seem to be helping the brand/business attract visitors or be the sharing type. Anyway that’s enough ruffling of duck feathers – for now – let’s take a little trip down memory lane and write some gubbins about Loquax and 2024.
New On Loquax
Despite it being advent season we did actually add a few extra bits to Loquax. The Comping Summary we’ve covered above and of course there was the favourites addition for the advent listings. Joining them in the new on Loquax stable are listings for Bluesky. Now don’t get too excited because there are hardly any prizes to be won on that social media platform and we’d not be surprised if it ended up like Threads. But the option is now there. At the request of uses we’ve also included an Enter Early section too. Again this isn’t bulging at the seams but it will highlight any prize draws or competitions that are better for you to enter early doors. During the slower times over the festive period we did take the opportunity to update a bunch of content across The Prize Directory and Competitions By Type. A lot of the blurb at the top of each section needed updating (Gadgets for example still referred to the PS4) so hopefully we’ve now dragged it all into the current year. Whilst this has all been done recently over the past 12 months it has been another busy year development wise. Our win a house section has been integrated into the new look Loquax and that was then followed by our raffle sites reviews section. Moving the win a house section also meant we could improve the discussion element of that section and after some initial reservations it’s running quite nicely. One change that came in during advent is a user based one and that change is that our competition links now only work if you’re logged in. That shouldn’t effect many folks but it was a necessary adjustment. Going forward into 2025 we will try and make little tweaks and improvements to the site but your input is also vital. So if there’s anything you think we could do to improve things then just let us know.
Meta To Do Away With Fact Checkers
On January 7th 2025 Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would do away with third party fact checkers and adopt the same ‘Community Notes’ as used on Elon Musk’s X platform. The decision behind this was because Zuckerberg felt that third-party moderators were “too politically biased” and that it was time to get back to free expression. If that’s the same free expression we see on X then that’s not exactly great news. Some compers think that this change could be good news for comping as it should mean less bans like those currently prevalent on Instagram. However we’re not so sure! Firstly the roll out of Community Notes on Meta is starting off in The USA so if that means less bans it won’t hit our shores for some time yet. Regulations in The UK and Europe make social media platforms responsible for their content and Meta will need to navigate those before introducing the changes. More importantly this change is about content that gets flagged and needs checking. It doesn’t necessarily refer to potential spam issues. In other words we don’t think this involves the spambots that are used by Meta which can’t distinguish between genuine spam and someone commenting and/or tagging to enter a prize draw. That might not be the news compers want to hear but hopefully we’re wrong and the situation improves. Sticking with the Insta ban issue, we did try contacting various people at Instagram including Adam Mosseri, Tessa Lyons and Gedioen Aloula. We didn’t expect them to reply personally but some kind of acknowledgement from someone at Meta would have been good. Perhaps if Facebook and Instagram end up like the cesspool X has become then more promoters will look to go back to being “old school” and run promotions via their websites rather than simply generate traffic for Zuckerberg, Musk and co.
Win A House For 9p
In November’s update we told you that Elite Competitions were offering the chance to win a house for just 29p. They had 10million tickets to sell and remarkably they sold out! The winner, Scott Bond, decided to take the house worth £900,000. Scott had the choice of taking the house or a cash alternative of £750,000 but he couldn’t decide so left things down to fate. He actually tossed a coin to decide which prize he’d accept!! Anyway Elite Competitions are doing it all again this month but at just 9p a ticket (and using our discount code ‘loquax’ that’s about 8p). The prize this time is a house in Lancashire but the winner has the choice of taking £230,000 cash instead. It’s currently 34% sold and runs until the end of January. As well as giving you the chance to win a house, your 9p also could give you an Instant Win prize of anything from site credit to £11,000 cash (a £12,000 top prize has already been won). Staying with the win a house section for a moment we did make some adjustments to that section in December too (blimey we were busy). In the past a house competition either concluded with a property winner (all tickets sold) or cash winner (not enough tickets sold). These days entrants can accept a cash alternative even if all tickets are sold but our stats didn’t reflect this. So we now mark results where a house has been won but the winner took the cash alternative differently to those comps – mostly run by Raffall and Raffle House these days – where cash has been awarded due to not enough tickets been sold. It sounds confusing but it does make sense.
“Changed Over The Years”
Recently there was a comment on The Lucky Learners Facebook group along the lines that another forum had “less competitions on it and more spammy links”. A reply to that comment was “that [site] and Loquax have definitely changed over the years”. We’ve pondered that comment for a few days. Does it mean Loquax has changed over the years or that we also have less competitions and more spammy links. It’s not clear but ultimately it didn’t make much sense. The former is most certainly true. This site evolved to be the UK leader, we tried to close and let others take up the baton, and since then we’ve evolved again. No other competition site – free or otherwise – is close to what we’ve done for online comping across the last 27 years (we just don’t get much credit or recognition because we don’t seek it). We don’t think there are less competitions – in fact it feels like more and more and 66,000 links over 12 months is testimony to that. But if anyone feels we should have more then either pay us a subscription or contribute. Spammy links is also a weird one! We’re pretty sure the other forum doesn’t allow them due to their hardline policies and we’re pretty good at maintaining our own content too. Yes we do allow a mix of prize draws and competitions from across the comping spectrum, and yes we do need to generate income, but our business needs are often put second to the user. We don’t allow some advertisers, we indicate ads to you as best we can, the gambling section of Loquax has been given it’s own home and there are filters to hide types of comps you don’t like. So when people are – seemingly – disparaging towards us with throw away social media comments we do wonder whether they actually use the site, have a clue how the site works or understand how the owners of the site run things? Sometimes it seems not – either that or we’re looking at our 27 year old ‘baby’ with rose tinted glasses and missing something blindingly obvious.
Highlight Of 2024
This part had to be rewritten. The highlight of 2024 was going to be winning a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. They were given them away in a festive prize draw to anyone who registered in time. The message of “you are successful” appeared and dreams of chocolately orangey goodness could start. Until an email from Terry’s appeared on the 31st December: “There were a huge number of entries in a very short period for a limited number of chocolate balls. This may have meant you received a confirmation message in error. Our Elves were totally maxed out before our website could keep up, our greatest apologies if you’ve received an incorrect confirmation message. Thank you for understanding”. Understanding? Terry’s you ruined Christmas, you ruined New Year, you ruined this blog and 2025 as well probably. Ah well! In all seriousness the best part of 2024 was when our users started leaving 5* Trustpilot reviews of Loquax. The background story to why is on the blog, but it was really lovely to read the various compliments and messages from users, many of whom who have been with us for many years now. Running this site is for the most part a lot of fun for it’s owners. We’ve learnt not to take things too seriously. But on some days it does feel like a thankless task. A task where people feel entitled to be rude to us, who feel the need to criticise, who belittle the site just because it’s free and who forget that real people run the thing to actually make comping accessible and free to everyone at anytime. We’re not perfect but we’re pretty flaming good. Thankfully there are good folks about who know this. So thank you to all those who left a review – and thank you to everyone who was with us and supported us during 2024. We truly appreciate it and that helps motivate us to continue. Here’s to a happy, healthy and winning 2025.