HotUKDeals

I recently signed up for this site just to see if they offered any real deals... a few hours later I get an email saying I am banned for Spamming? I have NEVER posted a single thing on this site, yet I have been banned and my account closed for "spamming". Don't waste your time. There are much better deal sites out there. Avoid this one!

Pretty much became a conspiracy site spreading all sorts of sick filth. I think the mods must be anti-vaxxers because they delete comments that challenge their publication of dangerous misinformation and ban the posters. Sort your mods out you twisted granny killers

HotUKdeals is great for finding some of the best deals on electronics
And more! Often doing competitions/giveaway on great products. They're
Reliable with a great community, definitely one to trust!

OK, whilst the deals come thick and fast, many are broken links, whilst others are found only as some local oddity at Tescos Leeds for example. If you really do your research you can usually find better - IF you are single-minded about your product. Also, some of the deals are fairly complex and need a bit of luck to work; using additional quidco or vouchers, or being a member of Am prime for example. A deal should be straight forward, and unfortunately many good ones here are not, or really need you too look into it before plunging. Many retailers have purposefully banged a bxxsxxt deal on this site just to get the traffic,: 10 minutes after your order with these types you get an email saying there's no stock. Surprise!

The app is buggy to say the least: I can have a stonkim BB signal and get it fails to load deals, comments, etc. Try to add an item and it flip-flops from one section "deals", let's say, to " vouchers". Then it simply doesn't load! People jump on your ad before you've even seen it come through to give a personal, biased opinion about a product they've never had, by people who have absolutely nothing else better to do. And if you think people won't spend anything on gumtree or eBay, then check out the tight-wads on this site. Total losers.

Some are useful deals information and some are not. Anyway, It's up to you to make the decision. I like to read the comments before use the deals.

If you mention a comment that goes against a website or company they make money on they get very upset and ban your account.

Hot UK deals are overly moderated, they don't care about the user and instead allow deals that bring them money in even if they are a poor / scam retailer.

They banned me for multiple accounts, despite that entering wrong login will just instantly create a new account... and as of writing this multiple accounts is not even on their rules pages (they do ban for moderation evasion according to the rules page but that was not the case...). Mods are apathetic and won't ban actual trolls that you report. They will instantly respond to your appeal then cease responding... lol

Trustpilot abuses power for anyone that pays them so legit reviews get taken down. The appeals process is garbage and results in multi-month long takedowns with unreasonably reasoning. Hotukdeals exploits this to the fullest as do all the horrid companies that review their (((trustpilot))) reviews...

The site used to be a fun place with some great contributors, but since Pepper took over they installed the most humourless forum mods I've ever encountered. It really is shockingly bad now.
Most deals are being posted by their own staff and anyone else's gets quietly deleted. There is some quite obvious backdoor paid promotion going on. You'll also start noticing the same deals being posted again and again, despite only a 1p difference from last week. Those same deals automatically get ~120 votes as soon as they are re-posted and they will get picked to got on their email highlights too.
But the mods really are the worst aspect of this site, you'll make an innocent joke which lots of other posters will thumbs up but they'll pounce all over it, this really leaves a sour taste in the mouth as you have no way to appeal their oppressive response. If you dare to drift even slightly off topic your account gets dumped into a permanent moderation queue where they will treat you like a naughty child indefinitely and "review" every single post. This mocking behaviour gets old really fast.
If you get bored of their overbearing behaviour and make a new account to get away from their nasty clique of favoured posters, they'll instantly ban that new account. Apparently if you dare to defy them any further they will IP ban you? Honestly the site is like North Korea now, it really is...
I used to be a frequent deal poster with a great rating, but after the disrespectful way they treated me I just stopped posting any more deals. Now I just use a VPN on a new account and will never bother posting again.
Unfortunately their behaviour has attracted the same authoritarians onto the site, so many of the permanently offended types will start arguments if you dare to not gush over some dull progressive game that they like to post every other week. They will then trawl your post history and report everything you've ever said to try and get a mod to overreact. It's petty and annoying but they have clearly sensed the new moderation style and are playing up to it.
The site is OK if you buy a lot of stuff, although they seem to REALLY like posting hundreds of deals for Lego for some reason? But don't try and engage with their toxic "community" like a normal human being, as they have no idea how to maintain a nice social vibe and eventually you will fall foul of one of their weirdo humourless power freak mods.
All they really care about is you obediently clicking on their promoted deals as often as possible.

Since Pepper took over this site is awful. It's no longer a community deals site, instead it's a sneaky affiliate marketing site with a worrying agenda. The mods are crazy & incompetent. Lots of undisclosed paid promotions. Be very careful using this site.

This is just a scam website, affiliate links all over it and won't accept independent shops saying that they don't have good enough feedback when they are a national organisation.

I am a constant deal poster and have been banned without any notification or warning!
All I did was report another op for posting a permanent free offer that should be in discussions not deals as per there own site rules. Many of my deals have been taken down for ridiculous reasons that are not fair.

Just because I'm not a Pepper member or expert my deals are being constantly removed.
The other deal is still live and my account is suspended and I have not used any bad language either.

The mods have become too trigger happy by picking on the average user and have ruined the user experience for everyone.
They allow foreign deals constantly posted on the site by the Pepper users which should not be allowed as it's Hot Deals UK.

The mods remove deals without giving us a chance to justify it and when you message the nods they do not want to know and don't care about the reasons.
For example I posted a deal on a new line book case from IKEA with a low price and they took it down due to it being a permanent price but they allow many users to do this.

My experience of the site has been ruined by the mods forever.

And it just got worse, down to 3.2 on trustpilot, what a joke. They dont care about your opinion, they put your comments in moderation for no reason and flag your reviews rather than do anything about this terrible moderation and guys just make your own facebook page and post your own deals with your own affiliate links like i did, you can do whatever you want and they cant do anything about it.

Guys this website is awesome! The first thing I do every morning when I log onto my computer is to check this site for the latest deals and price glitches.

Constantly getting banned from this website for discussing items in detail.

Without any context if you argue with popular posters you are banned. I recently was suspended for telling a poster to stop giving out damaging advice chich would cost people £100's

Hotukdelas removed all of my posts and left the other mininformation posts up, so that others will fall into this mistake and cost them money.

They have truly gone woke to the extent they care about their own image than creating a platform for a discussion on the products / deals.

Most deals are just amazon or eBay discounts anyway. No point signing up to this website whilst it is the digital deal equivalent of the KGB.

They also tried to get my review banned and removed on Trustpilot, and actually succeeded in my 1st one. So now I am on the crusade to make sure people know how unethical this company and their pepper moderation team is.

They are censuring comments. No opinions are allowed on their site.
Huk became an advertising platform for big companies.
No real deals for people.

They Sold out to big companies, try to post any warning or negative about a big firm like Disney and your post get removed.

I registered on their site so I could search a thread, hoping there would be more options for a registered user to search a thread for information. Next minute I got banned for and I quote "spamming". I never been to their site before or even interacted with their site before this and thought if I contacted them, I told them what happened and hopfully they would get it sorted out. Nope, one of their moderators replied to my help message that I have been justifiably banned for spamming their website. Not only that, their attitude in their message was piss poor and randomly rude despite having never interacted with me and asking them to unban me so I can use their site. They say trust their detection systems and to reply back if you think they made a mistake. As you can believe, they never replied back.

Regular user for several years.

The website is a bit clunky, and filtering has always been buggy for me. There's a distinct lack of user-filtering controls too - you can't block people, for example.
My biggest gripe is the paid endorsements maskerading as deals. The scores are set by the site, not by users, which is very misleading and, because you can't block posters you can't block these stealth adverts. You'll know what they are because they're usually posted by employees, and you'll see the same deals several times a day, and they're really not very good deals at that. And I encourage you not to get involved with commenting, just use the site for skimming deals, not for social media.

That aside, it's a quick way to eyeball some genuinely good deals. I've had some bargains from there. T

Where to start? The moderation and shady behind-the-scenes deals going on here has gone off the rails. I noticed over time that the deals were becoming more and more niche, they were the same deals from the same retailers coming from the same posters every time. I started looking into it, but of course found no luck on the website itself as any discussion of this was deleted and censored. Here's a quote from them in a reply to another reviewer:

"- There are no 'fake' votes, whether up or down. Every registered member can vote once on each deal. Some members (staff and non-staff) have higher voting weight based on longevity and prior contribution. But again, there is no way we can 'fix' this and we have absolutely no desire to.

- hukd team"

There we have it, whether they intended to or not, they've just spilled the beans and stuck their foot in their mouths. Certain people on their website "staff and non-staff" have higher privileges and voting rights over regular members, so what are the 'weighting' of their votes exactly? Does a staff member have the voting strength of 10 people, 50 people, 100 people? We don't know, and this mechanism is ripe for abuse if it isn't being abused already.

Second, the censorship. Looking at the deals themselves hoping to shed some light on them, I'm met with a very unnatural, rather disturbing comment section that looks strongly filtered. The comments are mostly people talking about the deal being good and how they are thinking of buying the product with very little criticism or reflection. Now I tried to tackle this and say that a specific hot deal was selling at RRP, and looking at the timeline of the products' price it was actually pretty high; my comment was deleted for being "unhelpful", yikes, third red flag.

I didn't challenge this and made another comment on an AMD CPU, I asked if the specs was much better against older versions such as the Ryzen 1600 as the price point might not be worth it. Comment removed. Why? Because I was going off topic apparently and derailing the comment thread. All of my comments then from there on out were pre-moderated before they could see the light of day and 80% of the time were deleted for ambiguous reasons, 4th red flag.

There's other examples but this review is getting quite long. The whole thing is looking a lot more 'North Korean' every day where there's nothing but plastic fruit in the windows and you're left standing there going "come on, really, where's the real fruit?" The moderation has been kicked into overdrive and I'm pretty good at doing my research, and a lot of the 'hot' deals on there day to day are not deals, they're RRP, and the whole thing is now closely resembling the ads on my Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The fact that they stated above "there is no way we can 'fix' this and we have absolutely no desire to." says a lot, they're aware of the issues but they don't care to change them. I understand that it's a free service and that they need to make money, but what they're doing is illegal and they need to state whether a deal is sponsored or not in some way, and you need to be upfront to users whether a deal is boosted or not which can easily be done by a method shown above with 'weighted voting privileges'.

There's lots more to be said here, and I think that this was once a good site, but somewhere along the way they realised just how much money they could make off of their user base and became shady, corrupt and disingenuous. Do your own research for deals and don't trust this site anymore, that's all I can really end this on.

PS: I'm posting this here because HUKD keeps getting my comment removed from 'Trustpilot'. It seems I hit a nerve with their mods, shame that 'trustpilot' isn't so trustworthy as it has lots of boosted 5 start reviews of HUKD which were done by HUKD giving away prizes to leave reviews for them on trustpilot.

I Have been a member for over ten years. The site was laid back with fun members and you could find good deals and have a laugh,

From the past three years ( Pepper took over) the site is rubbish, sometimes even laughable... the moderators are uptight and trigger happy to delete comments for no apparent reason! It reminds me of the defunct Rpoints. I hope they get rid of some moderators as they are spoiling the site.

Not a nice place!
Ignorant customer service, ban happy moderators.
If they see you getting a lot of likes they instantly ban your account, without a reason... absolutely no sense of humour, or how to run a friendly enjoyable online atmosphere.

'AVOID!'
There's much better, friendly and more welcoming deal sites out there... Don't get sucked in and line the pockets of these nazi's.

You can't add real online deals so you won't find real deals. They remove it. I think they only accept major retailers. It's not a community run web site as advertised. They have a fake contact us page also as i've sent 5 queries and no replies in over 2 months. Avoid, I agree with the first review. Check online, google you will definitely find better for everything.

The website is only good for looking for some deals. They only post about major retailers really as i have tried a couple times (only my second deal post, the first for Flamingoland) to post a deal for a particular website. The deal was taken off immediately and i was given a formal warning and told i may be promoting it for my own benefit. The admin and help 'teams' are rubbish and never responded to any of my emails. Don't bother trying to help your fellow man by posting your deal on their site, go elsewhere.