Love Leah reader survey results

Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill in my reader survey! It was very enlightening, and you're a lovely bunch. Let's see what you all said than, shall we?

Question 1.
What is your age?

26% of you are 25-34, 38% of you are 35-44, and 25% are 45-54. There are a few of you younger than 24 and older than 55. I appreciate all of you!

Question 2.
In which country do you live?

67% of you are in the UK, and the rest are made up of a bunch of countries - primarily the US/Canada and Australia, but also Holland, Germany, Russia, Finland and Sweden.

Question 3.
Does the 'Read More' clickable put you off reading my full blog post? 

25% said yes, 75% no.

If you follow me through Bloglovin, the full article is posted there with no 'read more'. Also, when you come to my blog if you click on the post title (i.e. "On the death of friendships") you can see the whole post. I like using a read more as it puts plagiarists off stealing posts. I had several posts stolen wholesale last year - photos, words, the whole damn lot. The site was removed eventually as they did it to loads of other people, but it was still a lot of stress and hassle. What I will start doing though is writing a couple of paragraphs and then do the read more. Currently I do a photo - brief introduction - read more. So there'll be a photo and a couple of paragraphs to see if you want to read the whole thing or skip it.

Question 4.
How often do you think I should update with a new post?

Although a few people wanted daily posts and a few said once a week, the vote was tied between every 3 days and whenever the hell I feel like writing, and I love you all for that! 31% said every 3 days, and 32% said whenever I feel like it. I think every other day feels like a natural fit for me, depending on life stuff of course. I learned last year not to blog when my heart isn't in it as it really shows, but blogging 3 or 4 days a week seems most natural to me when all is going well.

Question 5.
What are your favourite posts of mine?

This was multiple choice but the top 4 categories were plus size fashion, followed by opinion posts, with fat issues coming in third and life lately updates 4th.

Question 6.
What would you like to see more of from me?

Again this was a multiple choice answer. Opinion posts was the winner by a nose, with 54%. 50% said more fashion, 47% fat issues, 45% life lately updates, 20% more beauty, and mentions of travel and mental health posts, and to start doing vlogs again.

Question 7.
Please leave any other feedback or suggestions you have.

89% said carry on doing what I'm doing, but a LOT of people said they like me when I'm being most me - honest, sweary, not trying to suck plus size companies' arses. I bloody love you all for that! Some of you went into great detail about how you love my honesty in my opinion posts, which is hilarious as those are the ones that get me in the most shit with other bloggers. Still, I've always said and I always will - I don't write for other bloggers. So thank you for loving me at my ranty, opinionated self. You have no idea how much that means.

A couple of people did mention the problem of me using Google+ comments. I know it's not ideal as some people don't have or want a G+ account, but here's why I use Google+. I loved using Disqus, but it constantly fucks up. At least once a month I'd have several people coming to me saying 'I can't comment on your blog.' Disqus help is non-existent - I mean they must know it's a flawed product as it's constantly on the blink and it has been as long as I used it - a good few years. It didn't just fuck up for a day here or a day there, but for weeks at a time. I used to have up to 50 blog comments on one post, now I'm lucky if I get 5. Part of that is down to my winning personality (HAH) and my honesty/big gob pissing people off, and I think part of it was because people got sick and tired of not being able to comment and gave up trying. When I uninstalled Disqus I lost 13,000 comments on this blog but by that time I was SO fucking sick of it I didn't even care. I just wanted people to be able to comment again. You can tell how much this winds me up just thinking about it from the amount of fucks I've liberally sprinkled through this paragraph!

I've tried using the basic Blogger comment system but it's so clunky. There's no threading of comments (a long line of replies) like in Disqus or Google+ and I get sooooooo many emails from Blogger. An email to let me know a comment has been made, an email when I reply informing me of of my own fucking comment, an email if they reply again. It's ludicrous that there's no perfect commenting system on Blogger at all, which brings me to my next point. At some point I'm going to begin the process of transferring to Wordpress self-hosted as there's so much more control there and people tell me Disqus actually works on Wordpress. I hate Wordpress' native comment system with a passion as you have to sign up to every other bugger's comments to see if the blogger has replied to you. No thank you. But you can use multiple comment systems on Wordpress if you want - Disqus, G+, Facebook comments etc all together, which means everybody should be able to comment on it. It seems Wordpress is the way to go if you want full control anyway, which I do.

I actually tried to install a 2 comment system on this blog, which by all accounts you *should* be able to do, but all it did was hide the comment box from everyone (even me). Even after I paid someone to fix that problem it had somehow turned comments off on almost all of my blog posts. I had to edit 5 years of posts individually to sort it out (over 1500 of them, which took about 24 hours over 3 days) so for the time being I am sticking with G+, even though I know it's a pain in the arse for some of you.

In the meantime, all of my posts are syndicated to my Facebook and Twitter pages, so follow them if you don't already and feel free to comment on my posts there if you don't want to use G+ comments.

EDIT - As of April 2017 I've gone back to the basic Blogger comment system.

If you have any more comments or suggestions and you're able to, let me know in the comments. 😜

Thanks for reading.
Leah xoxo

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