From Tuesday 25th January we will start to show you the “For You” feed! This mean you'll see a mix of deals based on your interest and general popular deals. We hope you like it!

Thanks to everyone for their patience here. We’ve spent the last few weeks assessing the trial, and I wanted to share the outcome. A bit more detail is below, but as I guess it’s the bit everyone is most interested in… Our decision is to not continue this scheme or run further tests at this time.

We genuinely learned a lot from doing this test, and we aren’t ruling out trying to find a way to get great deals shared directly from partners onto the site - but based on what we have found, we believe we shouldn’t continue on the exact same path for now.

Main findings:

• Verified Partners did not spam the sites, which was definitely a possibility if we hadn’t had the rules we did. Unfortunately, the complete opposite happened - with VPs only providing 0.27% of the activated deals during the test period.
  
  
• The quality of the deals varied massively by partner. But overall, not enough deals got super hot for anyone to be excited about, nor was the average temperature what we were hoping for. I think this is a real shame, as certainly in some of the other countries we ran the test in, we saw a good number of 1000 degree+ deals, but still not enough of them.
  
  
• We appreciate there was very strong feedback from many of you, and of course we took that on board as part of the overall results - it was very much in the Cons columns, as we don’t enjoy annoying or upsetting members.
  
  We also looked at what the community as a whole did before, during and after the test. We were pleased to see that the number of deal submitters, voters and commenters stayed consistent, and we didn’t see a spike in account deletions. We also ran a survey asking users if they trusted the site, and these numbers stayed the same before and then throughout the test.
  
  
• As intimated above, there was a real issue with Verified Partners use of the test. 45% of them were either totally inactive, only submitted deals we had to decline, or stopped submitting within 4 weeks. This was frustrating, especially as the partners who did post popular deals gave us nice feedback about the test.
  
  
• The click outs to partners and revenue driven was low - especially in relation to the amount of person-hours we had to put in to run the scheme.

Taking all these reasons in combination, we don’t think continuing this as a full time programme, or running a similar test in the short term future, is the right course of action.

In the original announcement below I mentioned we were working on improving the logic used in the duplicate check. Now, from later today it will launch for the desktop website, and then be introduced on app in the upcoming weeks.

This new logic is not as precise as the existing one, so should be able to catch way more edge cases. Let us have any feedback so that we can work on further improvements.

Update

We have now launched the new badges I mentioned. So to confirm, from tomorrow morning these will start being given out:

- Jalapeno (you had the hottest deal of the day 1 time)
- Habanero(you had the hottest deal of the day 5 times) ‌
- Reaper (you had the hottest deal of the day 20 times!). ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Enjoy racing to be the first to get the Reaper!

This also meant the Blast Off! badge was now very close to the ones above, so we have changed it slightly. It is still a badge that you only hold for a short period, but it is now awarded to the person who has the hottest deal of all those posted in the previous 30 days.

Each day it will look back at the new 'previous 30 day' range and re-assign the badge. So it is possible to keep it for a few days, if you posted something absolutely scorching. Be sure to take a screenshot though as it will disappear eventually

Winners now announced - please see first comment

Thank you for all the nominations! I am closing this now, and we will launch the full awards voting later this week (all things being well!)

Hi everyone

Today, Boris Johnson announced the roadmap towards easing restrictions. This is subject to a series of tests so it isn't carved in stone, but on the back of it we wanted to update you on the rules laid out below.

Firstly, you can find the roadmap here: bbc.co.uk/new…518

Secondly, the roadmap is only for England, but we don't have dates for the other UK countries yet - as we do we will update further but for now this is all we have to go on

So the changes to our 'Lockdown rules' will evolve as follows:

• From 29 March we will allow Click & Collect deals, and deals for all in-store items from shops that are allowed to be open, as at that point the ‘stay at home’ order is removed.
• From April 12 we will allow deals for all the business types that are allowed to be open - Non-essential retail, hairdressers, nail salons, beer gardens and alfresco restaurant dining, libraries, zoos, gyms, swimming pools, self-catering holidays.
• From today, we will allow Travel deals for trips from April 13 and providing free cancellation/rearrangement is possible.
  
  This is the day after the review into International Travel is due. Obviously we don't know what it will say yet, so every travel thread will have this warning inserted by the Community Support team (if you are able to add it yourself, it would be much appreciated )
  
  IMPORTANT: Travel is currently prohibited - UK hotels aren’t allowed to open till May 17, and international travel is still under review. So please be aware if you book this that it could be cancelled, moved, or if it’s an overseas trip you could be required to pay to quarantine in a hotel on your return.
  
  

As ever, please share your thoughts and questions - and fingers crossed this light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting a bit brighter!

An update to this, now it's been in place for a little while.

What constitutes proof in order for an offer to go into deals, is a question we get quite a lot. We wish there was one simple answer, but so much depends on the type of deal and other factors. Often, posters don't want to reveal the source of their information to the wider community, which is fine but also makes it hard for us to show examples of give confirmation of what we will accept as proof.

So while we can't give a definitive list, we want to make things hopefully a little easier. From now, if something is posted on another Pepper website (such as Dealabs or MyDealz) then in general we will accept that as proof - it would be great if you can provide a link to the other deal to our Community Support team when you post one. There still may be occasions when we need to confer with our colleagues over at those sites to understand the underlying evidence seen, but hopefully this will help as general practice.

Any questions, let me know

We have entered phase 3 today, with grid view shortly becoming unavailable altogether.

We will also be retiring 'compact view' from within the mobile app, for the same reasons.

Thanks to @CRTC who has put together some instructions to get a grid view using browser extensions - I have promoted it to the top comment below.

We are very happy for you to use this, but just as a heads up we won't be developing the site with grid view in mind from now on, and have no responsibility for how the site may look. Also, future product developments might not show up if you use that Grid view, or might even break it.