To be clear, I don’t think that WarriorForum will close anytime soon. However, I do think that it’s future is now more in question than ever before.

WarriorForum Sold To FreeLancer

 On 4/14/14 it was announced that WarriorForum had now joined the Freelance family. Tech Crunch also reported the sale, which was supposed to be for a cool 3.2 Million dollars.

On the surface this appears to be a good fit for Freelancer, particularly if they are able to creatively drive traffic to their main business without offending the core membership of WarriorForum.

However when you dig a little deeper you can already see that problems may be near. So near in fact that the future of WF may be in serious question.

Changes Lead To Uncertainty

There are two sections of WF that are designed as profit centers for the forum. They are the WarRoom and the WSO section. Both are pay-to-play sections, costing money either for access or for listing an offer for sale.

As a first step, Freelancer is changing the rates for these sections and it’s going the wrong way.

WSO Offers

WF is probably best known for their ‘WSO Section.’ This is a part of the forum where members sell information products or services to other members and they are typically had at a low price.

While some of these offers are well produced and offer genuine benefit to the purchaser, not all of them are built so well. In fact some are just this side of an outright scam – a problem that as plagued the forum for years.

To battle this issue and help protect it’s members from horribly produced products or in some cases – outright lies – they charged would be WSO sellers $40 to create a listing. This put the bar of entry just high enough to dissuade some would-be scam artists from taking advantage of otherwise well-intentioned buyers in mass.

Freelancer’s first move is to reduce the price to $20 and thereby inviting the worst-of-the-worst offers back into the forum.

At $20 producers of horrible WSO’s need to make just 2 $10 sales or 4 $5 sales to break even, something even the worst promoter can accomplish. Further more, the potential for explosive profits will be very tempting through the use of shadow accounts to falsely ‘sing-the-praises’ of poorly produced documents in mass.

I can already see people writing new Xrumer XAS.txt files specifically for posting falsely positive reviews on their scammy offers. When the potential to make this much money is on the table – it only makes sense to gear up now and profit as fast as possible when the bar-of-entry is officially lowered.

Ultimately this will erode the already fragile trust in the WSO marketplace and possibly killing the one unique draw that WF has ever had.

The WarRoom

The WarRoom is a private section of the WarriorForum where experienced members share exclusive tips and tricks with fellow WarRoom members for free.

It’s very existence depends on the kindness and willingness to share of it’s members.

The price was set at around $40 for 20 years or lifetime access to the WarRoom – which is a reasonable price given the fact that the staff of the forum don’t actually do anything to produce unique or valuable content to justify paying for a membership to the private area.

Now, with FreeLancer’s take over that pricing structure is changing to $20 a year. This will do two things – neither of them are good for the forum.

First, it will again lower the bar of entry for freebie chasers that will offer nothing in return for access to the generosity of fellow war room members. These leachers will take and consume everything they can while offering nothing of value in return.

Secondly, because there will be on-going annual charges for access to the WarRoom, members who do contribute regularly will now have even greater motivation or stimulus to profit from their contributions. After all, internet marketing is a business and we’ve all got to justify our expenses.

The combination of freebie-chasers and profit-driving contributors will ultimately yield a lower value for the information in the WarRoom, less trust and greater motivation for unethical behavior.

The Wasteland Cometh

Over the past few years, talented contributors across the entire forum have left for greener pastures. This has already severely tilted the scales to ‘the blind leading the blind’ and poor quality conversations being had in virtually every subforum.

In other words the quality, value and resources of the forum have been eroding slowly even before this purchase was announced. Now with these two changes there is nothing left to keep the forum from being an even bigger joke than it has been already.

It would seem that Freelancer either has no idea what they are doing with the WarriorForum or they are purposefully holding the doors open for scammers, tricksters and con-artists alike. To what end I ask?

How do these changes possibly benefit Freelancer in the long run? In the short term they will have a surge in WSO and WarRoom fee’s collected – but both of these things will only damage the longterm membership of the site, turning helpful and useful members away in droves.

Prepare yourself, this will not end well for anyone involved…