It’s only 6 weeks or so since our March 2025 update but that already feels a lifetime away. The last few weeks have been dominated by some Trustpilot fun courtesy of an upset pay to enter prize draw siteowner. In case you missed it here’s a brief overview. Back in January we felt that one particular site was flying a lot of red flags and subsequently decided to remove their access to Loquax. No free advertising for them! We then decided to watch how the site operated and from there wrote our blog on can pay to enter prize draw sites fix their giveaways. We then followed that up in March providing more details about the site involved because competitions were going missing, including a 4 x £50,000 giveaway. Then at the end of April things started to take a strange turn. After years of no Trustpilot reviews we got our first 1/5 star review, then another and then another. It didn’t take long to guess the idiot behind all this but we then had to go through a very long and frustrating process with Trustpilot who one minute agreed all the reviews should be removed and then they changed their mind. “We only allow genuine reviews” they say but genuine also means reviews from the same person, under various accounts, attempting to game the system by making baseless accusations. We’re not big fans of Trustpilot. Anyway all’s well that ends well because over 70 of you lovely people took time to post 5/5 star reviews about Loquax. That was awesome and so lovely and we really can’t thank you enough.
Site Upgrade Update
It’s been a few months since we upgraded the forum and competition listings but you might have noticed that other sections of the site such as win a house are still on an “old Loquax”. Light is at the end of the tunnel though and hopefully in the not so distant future we will take the necessary steps to integrate more sections into “new Loquax”. Things have taken longer than expected because that’s how this kind of thing goes. It’s not just a case of sorting out the information you guys see but also how we manage it behind the scenes, databases and other boring things. Hopefully once we get things running we can not only bring other sections up to date but also integrate them into the forum. For Win A House Competitions this will mean we can drop the Facebook comments as a way of dealing with discussion on the various reviews. We also aim to bring back the tracker for win a house comps too. Once that section is sorted then it shouldn’t be too difficult to upgrade other elements such as the blog so that again discussion and commenting is a lot easier and based solely on your Loquax login rather than us using third party things that often prove to be less than reliable.
SuperLucky Subscriptions
Those of you who mix in other comping circles will have heard the news that SuperLucky Di is making changes to SuperLucky & Lucky Learners. This will include making the latter a chat only FB group whilst the former will become a paid for subscription service. Di cites personal family issues as one of the reasons behind the thought process and we fully get that and wish her and her family well. When we made decisions to change Loquax back at the start of 2013 it was under similar circumstances. Back then we were asked about running Loquax as a subscription service and we flatly said “no” as we just felt it wasn’t for us. In the wake of Di’s announcement we did sit down and discuss whether it’s a route we’d consider now or in the future. On one hand it might be better for us because ad revenues are continually rubbish and competitions has never been much of a golden goose. However the idea of managing a subscription service, dealing with customers, making sure you’re getting value for money, marketing to maintain paying users but also bring in new ones due to churn etc. just isn’t for us. Then there’s also dealing with those users who don’t want to pay but love using Loquax. We’re also not even sure people would pay because they can find competition listings etc free elsewhere. Which is a fair point but free listing sites also have to pay for servers that use databases for tracking, forums etc. plus myself and Kirsty need an income. We might not be “comping experts” in the same sphere as Di but we’ve been pretty good at what we do do for the last 26 years. Anyway the overall good news is that you’re stuck with not paying us anything until we can’t function as a service which is great for you and less stressful for us. BTW if you not paying us frees up so cash so you can pay for a different comping service then we advise one that’s value for money, not one that just gives you less than what we do for nowt. We don’t think we can say it more simply than that.
Purchase Necessary Competitions
Whilst our listings tend to be dominated by web and social media giveaways, we do actually include Purchase Necessary, Instant Win and Winning Moment style competitions too. In fact at time of writing there’s currently 150 different NPN competitions linked covering a wide range of products and stores. As with all comp type sections on our listings you can re-order the content by sitename, date added, closing date and prize. To assist you further we’ve also added a couple of popular stores that run NPN competitions such as Tesco, Asda, Sainbury’s and Waterstones. Now this section may not be the perfect “Comper’s Shopping List” but we think that it’ll help you find competitions within this genre. It’s also free to use which might be useful for those of you who are less keen on parting with cash for competition content. Recent additions to this section include the chance to win £125,000 with Miele. This one has a big qualifier as you’ll need to purchase an appliance between now and the end of April 2025. We’ve also just added a new competition coming soon from Homepride Sauces. They’re celebrating 50 Years and are giving away 50 x Family Days Out in a competition. As well as the NPN comps you’ll also find sections for SMS (which covers Tesco’s regular giveaways), Creative Comps and a few on-air radio giveaways too.
Woolworths Competition Bungle
We like to round up a bit of recent comping news in the blog but you might be thinking after reading the headline that we’ve gone a bit made. After all haven’t Woolworths been closed for a while here in The UK? That’s true but down in New Zealand Woolworths are alive and kicking and making a mess of a recent promotion. According to reports they sent out a $30 grocery voucher to 80,000 customers when the prize award should have only gone out to just 1000 (Stuff.tv). Ooops! Woolworths moved quickly to rectify the error by rescinding the prizes and instead awarding disappointed customers 500 rewards points as way of compensation. Legally they’re covered by the fact that the sent email was a reasonable mistake made by the person sending out the emails. This is good news for Woolworths because the wrong email group selection would have cost the company $2.4million if they had to honour it. These kind of mistakes do occur once in a while! Back in 2019 Zavvi notified hundreds of people that they’d won Champions League Tickets whilst in 2012 Boots sent over 9000 emails to entrants of a holiday competition to let them know they’d won a trip to Barcelona.
The Blacklist
In our last update we mentioned that some pay to enter prize draw sites had contacted us to request that their free prize draws weren’t to be added to the site. No sooner had we finished writing the blog then a few more requests popped in plus we noted that one site, Live Giveaways, had gone so far as blocking traffic from us to them. This does seem incredibly short sighted but we guess sites have their reasons for not liking compers. However sites not wanting to be included on Loquax do pose a slight issue because the site is created by users posting. We’re not always on hand to spot sites that shouldn’t be listed which can cause an irate siteowner to stamp their feet and throw their toys from the pram because someone who likes competitions is entering their competition. To avoid this scenario we’ve now got an official Loquax Blacklist for promoters. This means if a link is posted that shouldn’t be posted then it’ll be held in a mod queue rather than go instantly live. This approach protects us and also stops you wasting your time with rubbish sites who don’t want you to visit them, become a customer or share their content. In addition our Blacklist also acts as a spam trap so we can also keep out sites that we don’t feel should be listed.