Experts Exchange (EE) is a website for people in
information technology
Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system (I ...
(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.
History
Experts Exchange went live in October 1996. The first question asked was for a "Case sensitive Win31 HTML Editor".
Experts Exchange went bankrupt in 2001 after venture capitalists moved the company to
San Mateo, CA
San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster C ...
, and was brought back largely through the efforts of unpaid volunteers.
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. Its users are mainly young to middle-aged males in the IT field.
Paywall
In the past, the site employed
HTTP cookie
HTTP cookies (also called web cookies, Internet cookies, browser cookies, or simply cookies) are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's w ...
and
HTTP referer
In HTTP, "" (a misspelling of Referrer) is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI), from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web p ...
inspection to display content selectively. The page shown employed
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
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
In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content". A user agent is therefore a special kind of software agent.
Some prominent examples of us ...
string to that of a search engine
crawler such as
GoogleBot
Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler (t ...
.
In response to these obfuscation techniques, which prevented anonymous users from seeing answer content, a few members of the community wrote articles about how to bypass the obfuscation by spoofing one's web browser referrer using an addon like Smart Referrer and setting the
referer
In HTTP, "" (a misspelling of Referrer) is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI), from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web p ...
as being from Google.
Stack Overflow
In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fac ...
founder
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood (1970) is an American software developer, author, blogger, and entrepreneur. He co-founded the computer programming question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and co-founded Stack Exchange, which extends Stack Overflow's question-an ...
cited Experts-Exchange's poor reputation and paywall as a motivation for creating Stack Overflow.
See also
*
Bulletin board system
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...
*
Chat room
The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from ...
*
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...
*
Virtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communi ...
References
{{Reflist, 30em
External links
Experts Exchange
American social networking websites
Software developer communities
Internet properties established in 1996
Question-and-answer websites