[Update 12 August, 2011: SENukeX have extended their offer to get a Lifetime Licence for the software until 4pm EST today (12 August, 2011). So, if you thought you'd missed your opportunity, there's still time.]

A few months back I promoted the SENukeX launch to you. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that I had a number of problems running SENukeX myself in the early days and maybe my experiences made you think twice about subscribing to it.

They had a lot of problems with the launch as well (too many subscribers for their servers to handle) and the software crashed quite a bit. I maintained that the service was released too early and that it hadn’t been stress tested enough and that, basically, it wasn’t in a fit state for release to the public.

SENukeX relied almost exclusively on Internet Explorer for link submissions and IE was a weak point. Its instability, particularly IE8, was the cause of most SENukeX crashes. IE9 was recommended, but that version of IE is not available to Win XP users like me. So I ended up renting a Windows VPS just to run SENukeX. And, on that platform, it was much more stable than on my PC. There were still the occasional crashes, but SENukeX has an auto-recover feature so that it restarts and picks up here it left off following a crash.

Since the launch, the software has gone through quite a number of revisions as bugs were fixed, new features added and submission sites updated and changed. And then, recently, the SENukeX servers were were hit with a DDoS attack for about 5 days. Naturally, that impacted the service.

The good thing is, this made the SENukeX team adapt and they’ve made critical changes to their current server setup. Behind the scenes they were already making drastic changes and serious upgrades to the capabilities of the SENukeX software.

The 3 most important updates for me are the change of 90% of their submissions to Sockets, which means that only 10% of their Submissions have to go through IE now. This has had a twofold effect – it’s increased the speed of submissions substantially and it’s increased the success rate as well.

My last submission (which normally would have taken 30-45 minutes depending on the server) only took about 5-6 minutes to complete.

The second great improvement is that they are now adding tons of new sites and with the new addition of 6 new Programmers (whose only job is to add new sites to submit to) . So the amount and cross section of backlinks you can build with SENukeX will be 150% better than before.

One of my early gripes was that to use SENukeX effectively, you had to subscribe to a decaptcha service in addition to paying for SENukeX. Now, the third thing which has really impressed me about this latest SENukeX update is the addition of captcha solving. Over 40% of the captchas you used to have to fill in yourself or pay for are now solved 10 times faster and for Free. While it doesn’t remove the need for an external decaptcha service, the costs for that service will now be 40% cheaper thanks to the upgrade.

These are just a small part of the upgrades, and now with all the changes that have been made to get away from the terrible Internet Explorer 9 integration, the server has been running trouble-free without any crashes, and there aren’t any annoying Popups anymore either.

All gone. This thing is definitely the best Backlink Building tool in Marketing, Bar None!

For the Next 24 Hours (and a bit), they are also reopening their Lifetime License option as well, or if you decline the lifetime Option, you can get a Yearly License and I think they all have multi-pay options as well.

I first purchased SENukeX in April 2011 and all they have done is continually build and add to this software. Upgrade after Upgrade. No, I wasn’t happy with the software to begin with (as I’ve outlined om this blog), but the SENukeX team have worked diligently to fix problems and make the software robust. I think they’ve now achieved what SENukeX should have been when it launched.

There is no other software tool in Internet Marketing which has been around as long (the original SENuke was released back in 2008) unless you count in Market Samurai, which is running a close second (but won’t build backlinks and get them indexed for you as well)!

So, at this stage, I would recommend SENukeX to you. Yes, it’s expensive. But how do you value your time? You can build a lot of backlinks manually or using some of the other backlinking tools I’ve mentioned from time to time. But it all takes time. That’s the reason I switched to SENUkeX. I spend 60-90 minutes building a backlinking campaign and then set it in motion with SENukeX and it will build 100s of backlinks for me, all on autopilot, at sites which normally require you to fill in those captcha codes. And do it over a time period I specify – days to weeks to months (if I want). And the time I save on backlink building, I can put into other things, whether that’s building more sites or meeting friends for coffee!

Ok, I’ve had SENukeX for a week now and I still haven’t got anywhere with it.

Ongoing Lack of Documentation & Training

As I mentioned in my previous post about it, there’s a dismal lack of basic training and no written documentation. After many, many calls for such documentation and training in the SENukeX forum, the developers finally relented and agreed to create training materials in both written and video formats.

It will be a while before that appears as SENukeX is a complex product and that documentation needs to cover basic terminology and core concepts, especially for the people who came fresh to SENukeX rather than transitioning from the older SENuke app.

I only hope that rather than giving this project to some in-house employee, they give it to someone who knows nothing about SENukeX so they can ask all the basic questions a complete newbie would ask.

However, this product should never have been released without proper training materials and documentation.

That said, there is a guy on the SENukeX forum that has put together a 27-minute video that shows how to create a campaign and stitch together the modules in SENukeX. Those 27 minutes are far more enlightening than the so-called video training provided by SEnukeX themselves. The video costs $10 (it’s absolutely worth it if you have SENukeX and haven’t a clue what to do with it).

Was SEnukeX Rushed to Market?

To my mind, SENukeX was rushed to market, and wasn’t in a fit state for release. There have been 11 upgrades/bug fix releases in the last week alone. As a software developer, I know all too well that no piece of software is bug free. And the more complex an app, the more things can go wrong with it. But that’s what testing is about. By the time you release software to the world, all the major bugs should have been ironed out of the system. There will still be bugs (there’ll always be bugs) but they should appear less and less frequently as they get identified and fixed.

So an app that requires 11 upgrades in the space of 7 days suggests to me that it wasn’t stress tested before release.

So Just How Safe Is It To Run SENukeX On Your PC?

I expected that running SENukeX on my PC would be as safe as running any other bit of software that connects to the internet. The fact that I couldn’t use the software was probably something of a lifesaver in hindsight.

While I was trying to figure out how to use SENukeX, I was trawling through the forum looking for tips and advice and a couple of threads in particular took my notice. They were reports of PCs having become infected with malware and viruses after running SENukeX.

Now, if you want to go online with any bit of software (including regular browsers like IE and FireFox), you need to protect your PC with Anti-virus and Anti-Malware software and have a decent firewall. That’s just common sense. We’ve all seen the scare stories in the media about yet another security hole in IE that Microsoft has to patch. Well, SENukeX uses IE as it’s internal browser and those forum posts suggested that some of the viruses and malware encountered was not stopped or identified by whatever anti-virus/malware/spyware was running on their PC.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to have my PC compromised by a back-door attack that might come in via SENukeX. Granted, the SENukeX team aren’t responsible for the sites it connects to, but nowhere on the sales page is it mentioned that you should be prepared for viruses and malware and to take all necessary precautions. This might seem self-evident, but it strikes me as falling into their “if it’s obvious to me, it must be obvious to you” philosophy.

So I decided to run SENukeX on a virtual PC on my PC. This way it’s completely isolated from the rest of my PC and if I get an infection, only the virtual PC is affected. And there won’t be any sensitive information that can be reported back to criminals. I used the VMWare Player to create the virtual PC.

Other people apparently use old PCs or laptops for the same reason. Still others, probably more high-powered users, go the VPS route (you need a Windows VPS rather than a Linux one), but that’s yet another monthly expense.

SENukeX Still Isn’t Working For Me

The SENukeX Basic Tactics video that I mentioned above was a godsend to me. After watching it, things began to click and I finally had an insight into how powerful this software could be.

So I started to create my first campaign. One of the first things you need to do is to create email accounts on some of the free email systems (like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). I tried to do this initially by manually entering the capchas the signup forms display. No luck there. No signup form appeared for Hotmail. Then I bought some decapcha credits at DeathByCaptcha.com – with these, SENukeX can use a decapcha system to automatically convert capcha images into text and insert them on forms.

A word of warning for those in the EU – DeathByCaptcha.com charge VAT on top of their standard fees but even with this tax their rates are still lower than anyone else.

Hotmail account creation still didn’t work.

Then I tried creating a Yahoo email account. This was created successfully. SENukeX then tried to create it again twice more (using up 2 more decapcha credits). When I tried to verify the account through SENukeX, it said the account password was incorrect. Yet I could manually log into the new email account with the very same password. So yet another bug in SENukeX and one that prevents the most basic operation of the software.

I’m now waiting to have a support ticket about this answered (so more time lost).

Final Words

So here I am, one week on, 11 upgrades later with SENukeX installed on a virtual PC and it doesn’t even do the basic task of creating email accounts. This problem/bug doesn’t appear to afflict most users but since it does affect me, I can’t use the software.

So I can’t really say things are going too well or that I currently have a high option of SENukeX, can I?

We’ll see what the next week brings…

I find WordPress incredibly frustrating to work with. Plugin conflicts, plugins that only work on some webhosts, WordPress upgrades breaking plugins, bugs in plugins, the list goes on.

So as much for my own edification as anyone who visits here, I’m going to start documenting when things go wrong, and what things go wrong. Most of it will be WordPress related but there will be other stuff too, stuff to do with running an online business, like my broadband connection going down, etc.

I’ve been wondering where my time has been disappearing to. I spend quite a few hours a day supposedly building sites yet there are few sites to show for the work put in. Most of my time, it appears, goes into finding out why things have gone wrong, fixing them or attempting to do so, contacting the Support desks of plugin vendors and webhosts, logging into forums to find answers and other assorted methods of seeking answers and solutions online.

My experience with WordPress has shown that encountering a blockage to building a complete, working site is the rule rather than the exception. Those building a single blog probably won’t have a problem but if you’re trying to build multiple affiliate blogs, expect trouble.

If you’re building blogs yourself, maybe you’d comment on how things are going for you and if you’ve encountered problems yourself.

To kick off the posts in this category, here’s a big problem I encountered earlier this year - the WordPress Missed Schedule Posts problem…

…and then there were these problems last month (November 2010).

Aside from a couple of blogs like this one that I manually update from time to time, I also run some autoblogs built using the WordPress Mage system. If you’re familiar with the term, an autoblog is one that has a number of future dated posts queued up to be posted on specific dates. You build the blog and let it run on autopilot from then on.

That is until WordPress 2.9.x came along…
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