Experts Exchange

Experts Exchange (EE) is a website for people in information technology (IT) related jobs to ask each other for tech help, receive instant help via chat, hire freelancers, and browse tech jobs. Controversy has surrounded their policy of providing answers only via paid subscription.

Experts Exchange
Available inEnglish
OwnerRandy Redberg
URLexperts-exchange.com
Alexa rank 3,756 (December 2017)
CommercialYes
RegistrationYes
Launched1996
Current statusActive

History

Experts Exchange went live in October 1996. The first question asked was for a "Case sensitive Win31 HTML Editor".[1]

Experts Exchange went bankrupt in 2001[2] after venture capitalists moved the company to San Mateo, CA, and was brought back largely through the efforts of unpaid volunteers.[3]

Later, Austin Miller and Randy Redberg took ownership of Experts Exchange, and the company was made profitable again. Experts Exchange claims to have more than 3 million solutions.[4] Its users are mainly young to middle-aged males in the IT field.[5]

Paywall

In the past, the site employed HTTP cookie and HTTP referer inspection to display content selectively. The page shown employed JavaScript to display answers to humans after some content showing how to become a member. Subsequently, when an internal link was clicked by the user, they were blocked from viewing the answer information until either becoming a paid member or spoofing their browser's User Agent string to that of a search engine crawler such as GoogleBot.[6]

In response to these obfuscation techniques, which prevented anonymous users from seeing answer content, a few members of the community wrote articles[7][8] about how to bypass the obfuscation by spoofing one's web browser referrer using an addon like Smart Referrer[9] and setting the referer as being from Google.

Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood cited Experts-Exchange's poor reputation and paywall as a motivation for creating Stack Overflow.[10][11]

gollark: ~£120 or so for the calculator, my phone was £80.
gollark: For what?
gollark: They literally cost more than my (low-end, yes) *smartphone*.
gollark: Ah yes, buying a calculator which costs more than a phone.
gollark: That would be not uncool.

See also

References
  1. "Case sensitivite Win31 HTML Editor". Experts Exchange. 8 October 1996.
  2. Young, Greg. "Patterns aren't just for software. (Copy of Experts Exchange's newsletter on 2005/10/04)". Retrieved 24 February 2008.
  3. "Expert-Exchange's Topic". Experts-Exchange. 18 January 2003. Archived from the original on 29 July 2012. Retrieved 12 February 2007.
  4. "Experts-Exchange 3 million solutions". Archived from the original on 26 April 2011. Retrieved 4 April 2011.
  5. "Audience profile for Experts-Exchange". Quantcast. Archived from the original on 19 October 2012. Retrieved 22 September 2008.
  6. "Experts Exchange Sucks Now? Make It Work For You Again!". Walkernews.net. 18 August 2007. Retrieved 27 November 2012.
  7. "Desuckifying Experts Exchange". Coffeepowered.net. 7 February 2009. Archived from the original on 26 November 2012. Retrieved 27 November 2012.
  8. Haddad, Jon. "Experts Exchange should be removed from Google search results — Rustyrazorblade". www.rustyrazorblade.com.
  9. "Smart Referer".
  10. "Introducing Stackoverflow.com". blog.codinghorror.com. Retrieved 24 November 2019.
  11. "Who's Your Arch-Enemy?". blog.codinghorror.com. Retrieved 24 November 2019.

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