What's happened to "Head for Points" website
 

Has HFP gone off line, latest posts seem to be from 11/12/17, is it my iPad or has it moved?
Regards
Fdm

Not sure what you mean? I see 3 posts from today and 3 from yesterday and it works fine.

Hi, just tried & works for me!

Google it, click through and then save the new link.

They've done some IT stuff over the weekend.

https://www.headforpoints.com

now https but working fine

/They changed their IT hosting over the weekend. Perhaps you are still seeing the temporary old site they had up on Saturday

Sorry about that. Looks like your system has cached the server address - unless it looks it up again it won't know we have moved.

Reboot your internet router. That should clear it up.

If not, do a full cache clearance in your browser.

Rob

Thanks,
Got it now. Keep up the good work.
Regards
Fdm

The site is working fine but the content has been a bit thin for a while :(

No disrespect to Rob & Anika, it just seems great deals are rather scarce these days !

Headforpoints.com commentary [merged]
 

Tesco cc <cough>

Monese <cough>

Monese was a sponsored article and clearly marked as such right at the top!

I'm sure you're not suggesting that you would publish stuff which you know is rubbish and leads to readers stopping trusting you just because someone is paying you for it.

What wouldn't someone headless do for a pound or two?

Do you track if the emails are opened and read?

Yes. 55% open rate.

But if you agree to accept 3 articles a day from HFP (we send 21 per week, each article separately) then you are keen and seriously want to read it.

This makes no sense. We have 15,000 people on our list. I doubt I get one request per year directly to remove someone - the other 99.9% unsubscribe themselves. The 'Unsubscribe' is clear on every email, as per MailChimp requirements.

What is more likely is that Ben's emails ended up being sent from a server used by a spammer who was closed down and Ben was caught in the crossfire. Hard to believe they'd close him down given that MailChimp can clearly see he has been operating trouble-free for years.

It really depends on how the email list back end is set up. For the short period of time that I used MailChimp for a small nonprofit, we didn't have an automated remove feature (I had a link that generated a web page that said unsubscribe successful, and then on the back end, an email was generated and sent to me informing me of such, and I'd have to manually go in and scrub. It was just a monthly newsletter so I didn't automate anything, I mainly used MailChimp for statistics)

I'd imagine that you and others with a large web presence such as Lucky would have an automated system in place to allow people to unsubscribe themselves (where the system would automatically scrub their email address from the list). But the key point here is the assumption that it works. If there's any sort of error where the recipient isn't successfully unsubscribed, or the unsubscribe link is deceptive in where it only unsubscribes from one type of email but not others, MailChimp doesn't care, you're now a spammer in their eyes.

Interesting... I wondered how this could be calculated, and just found the answer on the MailChimp site. :)

With HFP, I tend to read the headline, and then if there's anything that interests me, I'll read the rest.

So, I probably fully read about 50% of the emails.

DYKWIA, this is why image blocking and other privacy-enhancing measures are taken by some internet users. But most miles and points forum readers don’t do a whole lot to help themselves on that as much as they try to help themselves with the miles and points game.

Do they also supply you information on the IP addresses from where those emails are opened? I would have to assume they could have a good idea of where the “readership” is. Do they tell you that too?

I would assume that your readership (and the value gotten from that) is less heavily dependent upon US users than OMAAT.

I have the location data but it is based on where the initial sign-up was done from rather than where any particular email was read. Annoyingly it isn't aggregated anywhere (I think) so I don't actually know what the split is overall. Website traffic is 80% UK, 10% US and dribs and drabs from elsewhere. You also see what device emails are usually read on, click through rates and indeed exactly which emails a person opened. Not that I spend a single second actually looking at any of this info!

Thats kind of stupid though... knowing the demographics of each of your channels is pure gold in terms of positioning yourself to advertisers. Usually the 'sign up for our newsletter and get everything in you mailbox' is a data gathering excercise by blogs and groups.

When you’re not much of a stalker, it doesn’t surprise me that you wouldn’t spend a single second drilling down like that (even as there may be some juicy nuggets in there, maybe even some gold). The same can’t be said about other online parts of the miles and points world, parts where the stalker mentality is more deeply engrained and used against one or more audience members whether or not there is a cash cow in the rough still left. :eek:

UK Head for Points..error
 

As in the title, HFP made an error, they reported non refundable stays upto June 30th can be refunded..

Please all dont do what I did,, check BEFORE cancelling...Hotel is very happy to have me cancel and take the money..Cheers HFP..

In fairness I have screen shots of the policy that says 30th June, before reverting back to end of April some time mid afternoon UK time. Seems either the policy was released prematurely, franchisees kicked up a fuss, or IT wasn't ready. Will be interesting to see whether it does change back to June again in the next couple of days.

It is back to 30th June this morning on the ihg UK website:

https://www.ihg.com/content/gb/en/cu...ravel-advisory


https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...a3cba827b9.png

Oh please, do me a favour.

IHG put up its new policy on Sunday afternoon (and indeed it was cut and pasted on this forum soon afterwards).

I did a cut and paste (slightly more elegantly, but still basically a cut and paste) into an article on Monday morning, with multiple links back to the source document so readers could confirm for themselves.

IHG pulled it on Monday afternoon, at which point we put a warning note into our article. As you will have seen, it was back up this morning.

In what way I am I responsible for this?!

What favor do you want?
Sign up through your site for credit card that will be pulled..
Your info was wrong..end of..

You should have signed up for the IHG Premium card when we recommended it and before it was pulled :-) You wouldn't have missed out then. It's not going anywhere for those who already have it.

We don't actually get paid for more than half of the credit cards we write about, including the IHG ones. We cover them all because it's the right thing to do.

Engineering Travel,

I only quoted what was posted on the ihg UK website on the morning of 8th April 2020 at 07:20hrs (BST).

The info I posted was (and still is) correct as at 06:00hrs 9th April 2020 (BST).

I am not after any favours (or favors in your lexicon).

I don't have a website, nor do I offer credit cards?

Sorry, but I cannot understand why you have quoted my post with your rather strange response.

Barney.

HFP is going down the drain.

First the new layout which forgets those of us browsing from their desktop as opposed from their mobile device. Now an advertorial of the worst kind on top of the home page.

i'm not a huge fan of their new layout (and i read on desktop as well) - but i don't think it's that bad !

isn't it easy enough to spot the advertorial content (presume it was the IHG post which offended you) and skip it ?

I meant the Marriott one.

I'm looking at the headline of the current first blog entry "MASSIVE AVIOS SALE – 50% off ALL long-haul flights, 25% off short-haul (and works with a 241)" vs the headline of the second entry "'WELCOME TO WONDER': We launch a week of competitions and offers with Marriott Bonvoy".

At first glance, I didn't notice the second one is an advertorial while the first one isn't. There is no distinction layout-wise. Only on second inspection I noticed the subtitle "Today we are launching 'Week of Wonders', a week (actually 9 days!) of competitions and promotions sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy." Of course, at that point it had become obvious to me the second one is an advertorial.

What don't you like about the desktop new look? We actually designed it FOR desktop, because there isn't much you can do with mobile layouts anyway and historically most readers access it from work on desktop. Our mobile penetration is far lower than internet average. I accept it works best on a 15 inch desktop screen which might be your problem.

Genuinely interested because we are fixing stuff in response to reader feedback, eg the reformatting of comments, the return of 'Latest Comments', the upcoming introduction of a dark mode etc. It is virtually the same as the old layout except that we've made it a bit more newbie friendly, it is responsive (so doesn't get lost on big screens) and the images are bigger.

Today's Marriott piece is not really advertorial. It is virtually a carbon copy of the annual article I write about each of the hotel schemes. With one obvious exception to come, the rest of the Week of Wonders content is stuff we'd have run anyway even if they hadn't booked a massive chunk of advertising. You also haven't seen the five competitions yet, which make up five of the nine articles.

We have never - ever - run an article on the site which was not written by our team and where we did not have final editorial sign-off.

As a reminder ..... excluding myself, Head for Points provides three people with a job. No-one had their salary or hours reduced during covid, no-one was put on furlough. We have continued to pay everyone despite an 80% collapse in revenue. The site remains free to all with no paywall or subscription options. Even October, with a couple of major sponsored deals, we will be 50% down on last year despite page views being up.

Hi Raffles,

I understand you are the HFP boss. Glad to see you are following this thread. As you're asking, let me try to be more specific.

Positive:

I think the new layout is optically pretty. Clean and modern feel. No clutter, search button is easy to find, as are the different sections such as the Avios tutorials.

Negative:

I just think screen real estate isn't utilized efficiently. Perhaps you are right, I am not your average user as my 25" QHD Dell monitor might be slightly bigger than what most people browse on. But that's where my "this site must be optimized for mobile" criticism stems from. Only three articles/headlines fit on my browser window. And I'm using slightly over half the width of my monitor and the ENTIRE height (I even have the Windows taskbar on auto-hide).

There is also under-utilization of my browser window. About 30% of the page is nothing but white space. I admit that may be an artefact of me running browser add-ons such as NoScript and uBlock Origin which may block ads usually appearing in that space. And that's fair game given the frequently very high quality of the content on HFP. **

Two other minor things: I find the credit card offers and such (before the grey background) slightly disturbing. They somewhat break the flow of blog entries. Perhaps I'd prefer them at the bottom or something. Lastly, the "OLDER" button which takes you to page 2 is a tad small.

---

** To my defense as I outed myself as somebody who actively blocks all ways in which you make money with the site (NoScript catches reflinking, too). For one, I feel somewhat in the right of "arming" myself in defense vs the operators of web sites which for decades have gone ballistic with analytics, pop-up ads and so on. For another, I am not opposed to paying for high-quality editorial content. I do have subscriptions to several sites (NYT.com...). Too bad this micro-payment thingy for blogs and such never really took off. I'm not based in the UK. Consequently, I don't visit HFP every day. But I would pay some nominal amount (GBP 0.50-1.00 per month) for using the site.

Noted, thanks.

Lose the ad block and it will be a lot more colourful :-) I am guessing the ad block also strips out most of the article images since they usually have links behind them too.

In general we publish 3 articles per day, so showing 3 ‘above the fold’ works. During covid this has got more flexible but this is where the 3+3+3 home page Idea came from.

Need the grey box stuff to make money off newbies :-)

As somebody who does *not* use Ad blockers (and who uses a 13" laptop), I have the opposite complaint - I find the page too full of content / adverts ... it sort of feels like there's no space to breathe !

I also find it a little soulless compared to the old site - I miss the Eiffel Tower / Leaning Tower / Tower Bridge graphic

Maybe it's also all the white which makes it rather blinding


I usually find that after a couple of weeks, a website's new layout grows on me. But whilst I've got used to "new HfP", I've never really got comfortable with it.

I don't *hate* it (and I was defending it earlier), it's just that I still don't really enjoy it.

13 inch is tighter, I agree. That’s because the sidebar is fixed width to fit in 300 pixel ads and so the content area is scrunched up. One option is to reduce the article extract on the home page to fewer words.

I'm not sure what it is for me, but there was something about the old layout of headorpoints.com that was easier on my eyes too.