WMW was one of the first forums I checked out. They are very popular, but the place is WAY overmoderated IMO. I visited several other SEO forums before landing here, which is IMO the best resource out there. The signal-to-noise ratio in here is perfect. Enough chatter to keep you interested and good advice to be had at all levels of the game. Most are helpful and contribute when they can. I hate the fact that the Google forum at WMW is pre-moderated. What's up with that? Maybe they just have too many visitors to their site. Also there is the standard there of "don't tell anybody what your website is" - I don't know if it's a rule or if it's just something that is very common for people to do over there, but it made me paranoid when I was getting started. They have "GoogleGuy" over there, but when I was around he was only marginally useful and was non-existant during big changes and people really wanted some sort of semi-official input. I'm also not a fan of their login system. Every time you log in it gives you a pseudo-demand for a membership fee that you have to read twice before you realize it's a request. I considered paying mainly out of curiosity for a while, but the benefit of having a lower noise forum can easily be had by going to any of a number of SEO forums. Cheers to Shawn for putting this place together.
Quite, nevetS. Overmoderated. Overhyped. Overblown. Overdone. And in the end pretty much just Over. I could never see any justification for paying their fee, whatever it is (and I have no idea what it is -- $2 would be 2 much).
I would never pay to join a forum. There is something about people saying 'valuable stuff inside, but you need to pay in order to see if it is really valuable' Features and tools I would be willing to pay for, but not the ability to read information that you can find on other forums.
I would pay if I thought it was worth it but so far I have never felt a need to do so. Funny how some of the sayings conflict such as The best things in life are free vs. You get what you pay for. I tend to believe the first one more than the second one. If you know what to look for that is. As long as you have members such as Michael and of course Shawn contribute in here on a regular basis, the information you can get in here for free is ... how they say it ... PRICELESS!