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Experts-Exchange

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Experts-Exchange (EE), founded in 1996, is a collaboration platform for information technology professionals, designed to address specific areas of situation-based knowledge. It's an online "ask an expert" site for computer related questions. The free access is limited (see below) while fee-based premium service is available without such limitations.

1 Operating Mode
2 Membership
3 History
4 Praises and Criticisms
5 Business Model
6 References
7 External links
- 7.1 Similar services
  - 7.1.1 General Questions

Operating Mode

The askers can post their questions in relevant "Zones" after they are registered at the site. The experts propose comments, and the asker is expected to select one or more comments that best solve the problem as the answer, and to grade the answer (from A for excellent answers to C for answers that helped a bit but didn't provide a complete solution) in order to award the most helpful experts. This is achieved by a patented system (U.S. Patent 6,064,978 ) that encourages experts to accumulate award points by providing satisfactory answers, and questioners to continue pushing experts until an adequate solution is obtained. The maximum point value for a question is 500 points and the minimum is 20. Based on Experts-Exchange guidelines, 500 points should be assigned to questions of a high level of difficulty, for an urgent request, or where some other large time or cost savings benefit will be gained by the asker.^[1] However, members with premium services subscription often assign the maximum point value to their simple or intermediate questions.^[2] An expert ranking system is provided to certify the experts according to their expertise, contributions and activities. A high ranking in most topic areas is generally indicative of an expert who devotes a substantial amount of time and may have a high level of expertise. The list of top experts includes a number of Microsoft MVPs as well.^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7] It is announced on Microsoft Exchange team's blog that Experts-Exchange is among the communities they actively look into to find people who make good candidates for Exchange MVPs.^[8] Volunteered members with various administrative privileges maintain the site by resolving arguments, closing questions left open by the asker, and assisting members with their site-related questions.

Membership

One must be a member of Experts-Exchange to be able to ask questions. As of late 2007, it is also necessary to be a member to view the solutions. People who are not signed in are redirected to a page where they can sign up, when they try to visit any Experts-Exchange page beyond the first page. This is accomplished through setting cookies on their machines. However, there are workarounds available.^[9]^[10] There are two membership plans available: free membership, and premium services.

Free membership

Users may sign up for a free membership account and receive a limited quantity of question points (125) that they can spend to get answers to their IT questions from other members (experts). They will be given addition 5 points each day, which they can accumulate and use for their next questions. Nonetheless, they cannot accumulate more than 500 question points.^[11] Free membership allows the member to search in Experts-Exchange questions using its built in search engine, but clicking on the search results redirects them to a page asking them to subscribe for premium services. Nevertheless, non-members can circumvent paid subscription by searching the site using search engines like Google (prefix site:experts-exchange.com to the keywords^[12]) and viewing the search-engine's "cache" of the page of interest. Another limitation of the free membership is the use of ads and popups which the site employs resulting in slower loading pages and diminished usability.

Premium services

There are premium services available by subscription, as well as by accumulating sufficient points (10,000) and maintaining minimum points over a period of time (3,000 per month).^[13] Members subscribed to premium services can benefit the full power of Experts-Exchange built in search engine. Also, Experts-Exchange pages load faster for these members because the advertisements are removed from the page. Be warned that your credit card details are held in your profile and that when your subscription expires your card will be billed automatically. Experts Exchange does not refund or pro rata automatic re-subscription fees once they are charged even if you do not intend to continue your membership; that information is provided in the Help page (30 Nov 2007).

Encryption

Expert-Exchange uses a simple encryption scheme to hide the answers from non-members. When the mouse is hovered over an answer, a message pops up prompting the user to sign up for a membership to see the answer. However, this can be easily circumvented by looking through the page source and copying the answers into a Rot-13 converter.

History

With over 10 years of experience, Experts Exchange has been an online IT resource that connects members to Experts around the world providing solutions to their technology issues. Experts Exchange has acquired a knowledgebase of over 2 million proven IT solutions in more than 950 unique technical zones and currently has over 10,500 Experts assisting in these various zone. Experts-Exchange went bankrupt in 2001 after venture capitalists moved the company to San Mateo, CA, and was brought back largely through the efforts of unpaid volunteers who loved the concept and operating mode of this site.^[14] The period following the bankruptcy recovery was marked by a rapid growth and expansion of the knowledge base and saw technical advances. Experts-Exchange was chosen as a runner-up for Best web resource for developers award by VSJ^[15] on 2006; The Code Project won this award and the other runner-up was MSDN. In the late months of 2006, Experts-Exchange allowed users to try out a new version of their website. In late January 2007, the legacy site was replaced by the site you currently see. Many complaints and bugs were reported during this time, but since then most have been fixed. Experts Exchange offers a skin (Expert Skin) that paid members or qualified experts may use if they prefer the Legacy site over the new one. The benefits of the Expert skin will Include smaller sized, less graphics-intensive pages, and a more text-based experience. If you are on a limited bandwidth connection, this may be a preferred Experts Exchange experience for you. The new site also brought about many new topic areas (now called 'zones') and the ability to cross-post. Cross-posting provides benefits for both those who ask and answer questions. Those who ask questions can place a link to it in up to 3 zones (instead of just one), which means more experts are likely to see the question and answer it. Experts who receive points on such a question will get the allotted amount of points in all 3 zones, making it easier for them to get certificates in other zones that are related. The expert's total points is only increased once for the question (even if the question appears in multiple zones). New rankings have also been added, as some experts have achieved the Genius ranking and had nothing else to aim for. The new rankings that come after 'Genius' are: 'Savant' (for 10 million points), 'Elite' (for 25 million points), 'Technocrat' (for 50 million points), and 'Legend' (for 100 million points). View the Ranks and their definitions.

Praises and Criticisms

The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the .
This section has been tagged since December 2007.

Experts-Exchange continues to have a large market share of the online technical support market, and has been praised as one of the best technical support sites by some of its reviewers.^[16]^[17]^[18] However, the majority of the professional community has shunned it for its perceived unethical practice of providing content to search engines that is not available to users without paying a fee (thus allowing it to receive such high search rankings - Experts-Exchange questions appear in the first page of Google results for a proportion of searches about IT solutions ). Some such users have developed and used a Greasemonkey script to filter it out of the Google response pages on their browsers. Alternately, some users set their browser's User Agent to be identical to GoogleBot's in order to see the full discussion without paying. Not all of the expert posted content is original; a list of links acquired from search engines may be offered as an "answer". The quality of response from the 'Experts' has been very widely criticised. It has been said that responses of similar or better quality are available at no charge from other Internet sources. [1] It is quite easy to cancel an account. There is a link in the help section that takes you right to the cancellation page. [2].

Business Model

The experts exchange business model is designed to exploit the expert knowledge of experienced/professional persons that offer their help for free, and then copyright their helpful posts. The common web surfer searching for technical advice will stumble upon experts-exchange.com search results and are then bombarded with suggestions to pay experts exchange in order to view proposed answers. Experts exchange tricks googlebot by not having any links to experts-exchange.com's registration page when googlebot is evaluating the page. Additionally, questions and answers are viewable by everyone only until google indexes the page result. So when you click on a google search result that leads to an experts-exchange topic, they benefit from advertisement hits (including their own), while not revealing proposed answers to the viewer. So even if you are not a subscriber to experts exchange, you are still exploited if you accidentally click a search result to experts-exchange.com. The easiest way to fully avoid being exploited by experts exchange is to log into your search engine of choice and filter out the experts-exchange.com domain from your search results.