From my understanding some of the reviews are from people who are given a free copy, along with some extras, in exchange for a good review. Others get compensated in other ways. It all depends on where you rank on the WF hierarchy with relation to number of posts and number of "Thanks" you've received. Recently, meaning around January, I noticed the admins making posts officially forbidding the practice of "WSO Product for Good Review" or "Quid Pro Quo" but the practice goes on but I'm not sure the average user knows it.
The fact about Warrior Forum is that it is a business, a very brilliantly developed business, that has it's own built in consumer base. If you can reach a deal with the mods and get their approval for a true launch of a product on WF than you stand to make quite a bit of money with the same list owners notifying their group of WF Members about a new "Fantastic" WSO that they simply must have.
If you go in knowing that WF is a business and not a true message board than you'll be in good shape as you'll know to expect the hard sell.
Having said all that there are some pretty good products that emerge from WF. I have purchased my fair share of Plugins and scripts and even a couple of WSO's from there. The tools are generally quite good and the prices are extremely reasonable. The only caveat being that you have to understand the products you're buying and how you can personally use them to expand your sales.
I have also bought a few WSO's for $7 but I never buy into the hype, instead I try to ascertain if the information being provided in the ebook has the basis of a method I hadn't thought of before and then I see if I can expand upon another persons idea and basically create my own system, or maybe a hybrid system. The thing about buying WSOs is that you have to have an understanding of IM to start with because the WSOs should be treated as "Unfinished products" from which you might get some useful links and some unfinished ideas. Then you have to take those ideas and modify them to fit whatever it is that you're doing so basically you will have to modify whatever it says in the ebook, to do that you need an understanding of how IM works. So the WSOs are very useless to newbs and those who are just returning to IM after a long hiatus.
Whatever you do, do not buy into the hype but if it's a WSO that's inexpensive enough and has an angle on making sales that you hadn't thought of before and you think you might be able to modify it for your own purposes than a fair percentage of those ebooks will come in handy.
With plugins it's easy because you can figure out straight away if a certain plugin will help your site or not and the prices on WF for many of these plugins are really quite low. With the WSOs you have to be a bit more careful and try to figure out if the unfinished information in that WSO is something you hadn't thought of doing before and always consider how you can mold that information to make it work for you with some heavy modifications in most cases.
The funny thing is that WF, in and of itself, is probably more "Black Hat" than most of the things we practice over here but as long as you keep in mind that WF is a business and not a Message Board than you should be fine.
This has been my experience and I hope it helps.
