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.
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, 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 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
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.
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 as being from Google.
Stack Overflow founder
Jeff Atwood 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
*
Internet forum
*
Virtual community
References
{{Reflist, 30em
External links
Experts Exchange
American social networking websites
Software developer communities
Internet properties established in 1996
Question-and-answer websites