Last week Loquax turned 21 years of age. It doesn’t seem real that this small part of the internet has reached that milestone. Celebrations were somewhat muted because the fact that Loquax has “come of age” makes us both feel incredibly old.
700,000+ Competitions
However, we did take a few moments to see if we could figure out how many competitions had been listed on Loquax in the time. Kirsty has a conservative estimate of 700,000! We also have had 83335 posts made to our Winner section (although this covers 18 years and only includes those people who shared their wins). Some of the replies to our birthday annoucement included “here’s to the next 21 years”. We didn’t expect Loquax to get past 3 months let alone 21 years. However 42 years of listing competitions does seem an impossibility. If the site is still going then then it most certainly will be in someone else’s hands. Myself and Kirsty will hopefully have long since retired by then – barring any further changes to the official retirement age.
Listing & Tracker Changes
Anyway, back to the present day and whilst we’re still custodians of the site there’s work to be done. Or in this work that has been done. Back in November we started the transformation of the competition listings. Although initially this met with some concerns we’ve hopefully reached a compromise in terms of “site” and “user”. The listings are now more mobile friendly and an upgrade on the “fix” that we put in place at the start of 2013 when users took over adding competitions to the site.
New today, closing soon, prize directory and the type of competition listings have all been upgraded. The change has also allowed us to add new listing options such as Valentine’s Competitions. The biggest change however is with respect to the tracker. For years we’ve used a duck as the indicator for “entered” but it’s become clear that new users – and regulars – aren’t always sure of the tracker options. Therefore we’ve taken the liberty of changing the tracker to make things clearer.
Forum Changes
The Community Forum has been part of Loquax since 2000/2001. Before social media it was an active – sometimes over active – hub of chat, competitions and the occasional bunfight. However times have changed and there’s less and less user interaction within the chat areas. Therefore we’ve decided to put all the chat sections together. This means comping chat, freebies, general chat and tech help are now all rolled into one. And that’s about it. 21 years on and we’re still tweaking things and trying to keep the site moving forward. That’s not always been easy against social media, new competitors and changing audiences. We also still have to generate revenue and run the site as a business. One thing’s for sure the last 21 years have been far from dull. Whilst we’ll not be raising a glass to the next 21 years, here’s to the past 21 and the next step of the Loquax journey.