UPDATE 1:  April 5, 2011 - WickedFire is back up.

Unfortunately, WickedFire is down. Oh dear, all those services to buy and no way to contact people! I've read all the reasons it might be down, everything from a denial of service attack to database corruption. Since I actually saw a database corruption error message, I'll go with that.

UPDATE: DDoS - it's officially a denial of service attack. WickedFire states that they are working with the FBI to track down the cause. Good - too often people get away with this BS, I'm glad WickedFire is going all out to track it down and stamp out the root cause.

Shawn at DigitalPoint actually posted on their "is WickedFire down" thread to say he saw an unusual amount of activity in the "Shoot the Sh*t" section of their forum. Except for criminal charges, I doubted Shawn actually existed - so it's nice to see he's a real person and that he goes to WickedFire too!

WickedFire is not for everyone. The forum is filled with brash, misogynistic, egotistical posts from people, who will flame you in a heartbeat and delight in posting pictures of boobs. Girl boobs, not stupid boobs. It's the only IM forum I know where you can get a plus rep for a boob picture.

These are also the same people who create some of the best IM tools around (whitehat, greyhat and blackhat.) They are usually on the cutting edge of internet marketing and BS doesn't fly there. But the egos and the flames go on forever.

By all means, join WickedFire. They have the best BST (buy sell trade) section in the business. But if you're a noob, don't post questions without reading the forum first. Because what the people there consider a newbie question would be advanced marketing for everyone else. I actually joined three years before I made an actual post.

I thought the forum rude, crude and I wasted a lot of time by not reading what they had to say about marketing.

New webmaster questions belong at DigitalPoint and IMTalk. While Warrior Forum seems to exists solely to sell stuff to the webmaster who wants to advance their site, members of WickedFire sells services that are effective at dirt cheap prices.

How effective? Depending on what you buy, services that are actually capable of moving your SERP positions about 20+. Which can be dangerous if you only have spammy links. Being on the front page of search results without having proper links is invitation for Google to ban your sites.

Do your due diligence first. Hubs, lenses, articles, and bookmarks first, with decent blog posts/comments - then hit WickedFire.

The site being down means that there are some services that I have to hit DigitalPoint for, which is a pain in the butt. This should serve as a warning to everyone, to actually note the actual websites for people you do business with or want to do business with.

There's a great post at ModestAffiliate.net http://www.modestaffiliate.net/wickedfire-is-down/ listing the blogs of some WickedFire members.

I stopped posting here because there was a lot of things I had to unlearn, relearn and accomplish to push my sites back up where they belonged. Also because I got into affiliate marketing big time and writing copy for my sites, Web 2.0 properties, HubPages, EzineArticles and Qondio is pretty much a full time job.

This may be a one off post until I figure out how to present all the stuff I've learned over the past year. It's been a strange ride.

Tag: wickedfire is down, is wickedfire down