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After being shut down by its owner Aaron Wall, former SEO professionals’ virtual waterhole Threadwatch is still up but no longer functional as of time of writing: Most navigation elements have been removed, and while new signups are still possible, posting isn’t. Seems that the entire fairly frenetic discussion by its members with its 183 postings couldn’t budge either Aaron or Dave Naylor (DaveN), the second mastermind behind the forum, to even respond let alone consider consider a slew of alternate models.

Expectably, quite a few former patrons haven’t taken too kindly to this kind of treatment – an turn of events that may cost both Aaron and Dave quite a bit of effort in terms of reputation management amongst their industry peers, provided they still care about it – presently, there’s very little indication that they actually do…

TW member Jason Duke (JasonD) had volunteered to set up a new forum to take its place at W3 Wisdom as an emergency measure to avoid the TWers drifting apart. It’s not entirely clear at this point if this project will come to fruition any time soon. As of now, there’s a temporary home available, hosted, as unlikely as it sounds, by Googlegroups.

There, it transpires that former TW mainstay TheFounder is offering to rededicate his AOSEP to serve the TW community.

In the meantime, EarlGrey of black hat Syndk8 Forum fame hasn’t been idle, either. He reports that he had offered Aaron $15,000 originally to take over TW, an offer which Aaron however turned down, demanding $50,000.

Comment: Unless there’s some misunderstanding or a serious communication problem at work here, asking $50K for a forum that was being closed down because of its unsustainable business model seems a bit weird, to put it mildly.

Anyway, here’s EarlGrey’s new effort, currently supported in the main by the Syndk8 community with only a handful of former TWers having signed up yet: Threadwatcher.

Kudos to SEOidiot btw for being the first to blog about it here: Threadwatch isnt dead after all.

It remains to be seen whether the TW community as a whole will actually shift in its entirely to either of these two successor solutions.

A split up seems more likely, most plausibly along the lines of the prevailing trashed-to-death white hat/black hat dichotomy, with plenty of “grey hats” probably commuting between the two. But that, of course, is mere surmise at this point in time.

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