It’s not exactly been a quiet few months since our last update back in June! As you hopefully might of noticed by now things are a little bit different at Loquax. After several long months of development and testing we finally got the new site live on it’s new platform. Whilst there’s still plenty to do it’s worth a moment to reflect on the reality of the situation. We’ve taken a site that’s been running on the same platform for the last 20 years and relaunched it on a new one. In addition we’ve also rewritten code that’s powered the competition listings and completely overhauled it. Now we say we but a lot of that work has been done by one person. It’s quite a feat and it was all done with minimal downtime and disruption. Feedback has generally been pretty good so that’s good news. In part that may be down to the fact we set out to rebuild old Loquax in design and function whilst not doing something dramatically different. That said we still managed to get one “if it ain’t broke” comment which is fine but if Loquax wasn’t broke we’d have not put ourselves through this marathon in the first place. Anyway we hope that you like what we’ve done with the place and that you’re settling into the new site.
Things To Be Done
Firstly a massive thank you to Guy who was the first person to test the site outside of the Loquax team, our beta-testers who spotted a whole bunch of bugs that were fixed before launch and then everyone else who reported issues once we made the switch. You might wonder why we launched with things not working as you’d expect or things like the homepage not updated. We tested and tested as much as we could but everyone uses the site differently. We spent days checking things but there’s no substitute for actual users comping on Loquax. With beta-testers we got a small snapshot of things that needed fixing but even they didn’t spot everything we’d overlooked or needed to change. In short the only way we could move on was launch the site. We could have spent more time on the frilly stuff but the main concern was get off the old platform and into somewhere stable. This means there’s still work to be done and over the coming weeks you’ll see us update old pages and content to reflect the new Loquax. Frustratingly it’s not as simple as it might first appear as sections like this blog, win a house and lottery content all need a good overhaul. We also have advent coming up which also needs to be upgraded before you all get into a festive frenzy.
Advent Comping Time
Well as we’ve mentioned it we might as well cover it. Yes we’re only a few weeks away from advent comping season. In fact Christmas themed competitions are already starting to appear on the listings. In fact there are more Christmas prizes than those for Halloween! Anyway advent or 12 Days of Christmas prize draws will kick off on the 1st December and as ever there’s an abundance of them. Our aim this year is to go for quality over quantity. Whilst we know everyone loves the annual giveaways from the likes of Russell Hobbs, Remington and other big names, if 1000 of you ignored Fred& Brenda’s daily £5 voucher for cheese prizes last year and only 1 of you tracked it then we’re probably not going to spend time seeking out their 2023 content. So our time will be spent sparingly but with the aim to make sure the good stuff is featured first and then if there’s time look at the less popular comps. Advent is incredibly time consuming for us and also pretty demoralising when our lists are either bookmarked or copied to other places. We’ve had a busy year and would like a less hectic December! Of course users are welcome and encouraged to add any advents they find which will help build the lists. For most users a shorter advent list featuring good quality giveaway isn’t going to make much difference. And just to be clear it’s still free to use (there are sites who will charge you for advent competitions), tracking will be included etc. plus there’ll be all the daily updates too. Anyway that’s the plan.
Your Loquax Preferences
Finally and back to the new look Loquax, there’s one thing we would love you all to do. And that is go to your Loquax account and set up your preferences. From here you can set the default order that you view competition listings, exclude any prizes or competition types you don’t like and set up a profile. With your profile you can have a cool little avatar, update some basic details and also set things up in terms of signatures, who to follow, check out any alerts etc. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory so we’ll not go into much detail. However if you do have questions about preferences or the new site in general then feel free to contact us. In terms of contacting us you are welcome to do so via email or social media. However please don’t suffer in silence or moan about us in other comping groups. We’ve run this site for 25 years now and have always listed to our users to make the site work for you. We’ve acted on a lot of your feedback as most of you know we would. However we’ve seen comments along the lines of we were now asking for feedback on Facebook and reading it – yet we’d been doing that all along – and a personal highlight “loquax is a nightmare now” from someone who hadn’t bothered to talk to us or explain why (and still hasn’t). There may be two of us at Loquax but we will try and help you as best we can.