Experts-Exchange

Experts Exchange

Web address	experts-exchange.com
Slogan	Solve, Learn, Network
Commercial?	yes
Registration	yes
Available in	English
Owner	Randy Redberg
Launched	1996
Alexa rank	5,634 (February 2014)
Current status	active

Experts-Exchange.com (EE) is a membership-based website for people in information technology (IT) related jobs to ask each other for tech help and network. It was founded in 1996.

At Experts Exchange, users are awarded points for answering questions asked by other users or writing articles the general community values as resourceful. This results in a competition for obtaining more points to achieve various experts' certifications.

The site offers a paid membership service that offers full access to those who primarily use the website to get their IT and tech questions solved. By actively participating in answering questions, users can earn points in order to gain premium membership. Those who obtain 3,000 overall points are given access to all features of the web site known as premium services, and they need to obtain at least 3,000 points in the previous month, 50,000 points in the previous 12 months, or 5 million lifetime points to retain these privileges.^[1]

Topic Areas, points, rankings, administrators

Once a user is registered on the site, they can ask a question and tag it with relevant “Topic Areas” that categorize the type of help the asker is looking for. Other users have alerts set up for Topic Areas that they would like to answer questions in, and once the question is tagged, they are notified either on-site or by email that a question in their favorite area has been asked. The experts comment to pose solutions, 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 points to the most helpful experts. If the awarded solution or grade is disputed, a Moderator will evaluate all responses and may change the distribution of points or the grade. 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.^[2] However, members with a premium services subscription often assign the maximum point value to their simple or intermediate questions.^[3]

This patented system (U.S. Patent 6,064,978^[4]) allows users to accumulate points to achieve two main goals: to earn a free account and certifications in topic areas. After the first 10,000 points, a user is named a “qualified expert” and earns a free membership for a month.^[5] Each month thereafter, the expert must earn 3,000 to maintain the free account. Points are part of a ranking system to certify that experts have proven their knowledge and skill set in a given area. Users can also earn points by writing how-to articles.^[6]

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.^{[7][8][9][10][11]} In 2004, Microsoft Exchange team wrote that Experts-Exchange was among the communities they actively looked into to find people who would make good candidates for Exchange MVPs.^[12]

Volunteer 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

Membership is either gained by bartering expertise (in the form of answering questions or writing articles) or by paying for premium membership.

Experts (those who have reached 10,000 points overall and maintain at least 3,000 points per month)^[13] and subscribers get the benefit of using the site's search engine without limitations and without ads. Premium service members can also ask unlimited questions, write Experts Exchange articles, save solutions and other content to their knowledgebase, follow friends and other users and add to their growing list of favorites on the site. Articles are free to view by non-members.

New members who pay to access the site accrue fees until they answer enough questions to qualify for the free membership. However, there is a free registration option that allows users to answer questions without any form of payment and earn free services.

After canceling membership, the member benefits continue through the paid period. So if a user prepays for a year but cancels after 6 months, the remaining 6 months are still considered paid and the site is accessible through the balance of time. However, the subscription will not auto-renew at the end of the year.

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.^[14] The period following the bankruptcy recovery was marked by a rapid growth and expansion of the knowledge base and saw technical advances.^[15]

Experts Exchange went bankrupt in 2001.^[16] Austin Miller and Randy Redberg took ownership of Experts Exchange later and the company was made profitable again. Experts Exchange claims to have more than 3 million solutions.^[17] Its users are mainly young to middle-aged males in the IT field.^[18] Originally, Experts Exchange could formerly be reached by visiting expertsexchange.com, which can be read as "Expert Sex Change".^[19] The company no longer owns that domain; it does not direct to experts-exchange.com. In February 2007, Experts Exchange made changes to the look of the site. Following that, they offered a skin (Expert Skin) that paid members or qualified experts could use if they preferred the Legacy site over the newer one. The benefits of the Expert skin were a less graphically-intensive, more text-based layout that results in faster page loading times.

The 2007 site also brought about many new topic areas 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. When a solution is selected for a question that appears in multiple Zones, the Expert's per-zone point total is increased by the award amount and their overall point total is also increased but only once. So if a question appears in three zones for 500 points and is awarded an "A" grade, the expert earns 2,000 points in each of the three zones but only 2,000 points are added to the overall total (not 6,000).^[20]

Additional rankings were also added, as some experts have achieved the Genius ranking and had nothing else to shoot 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).^[21]

On 13 November 2007, the number of solutions on Experts Exchange reached 2,000,000.^[22]

Experts Exchange ran a competition for almost a month before that date. The competition was announced on Experts-Exchange web site and its newsletter.^[23] A Dell laptop and a T-shirt was given to the user who asked the 2,000,000th question, the expert who answered it, and the user who made the nearest guess for the time and date of the 2,000,000th solution.

In 2008, it was announced that an Expert has reached 20,000,000 points in total and 18,000,000 points in one topic area. Both of these values were the most in Experts Exchange to date.^[24] Changes in the Experts Exchange business model has, however, shifted the value of points (sometimes referred to as "point inflation").

In January 2012, after 2 or more years of work, Experts Exchange replaced all legacy code (some of it dating back to the original launch) with a new version, dubbed EE v10 (referring to the 10th version of the site).^[25] With this launch, it rolled out a new look as well. Following this, in August 2012, it announced that the website would be ad-free.^[26]

In late 2012, EE announced the addition of Articles, which are free to view for members and visitors.^[27]

In the past, the site employed HTTP cookie and HTTP referer inspection to selectively display content. The page shown employed JavaScript to display answers to humans after some content showing how to become a member. Subsequently when an internal link is clicked by the user they are blocked from viewing the answer information until either becoming a paid member or spoofing their browser's User Agent string to a GoogleBot-like user agent.^[28]

After employing obfuscation techniques that prevent anonymous users from seeing answer content, a few members of the community responded with articles^{[29][30][31][32]} about how to bypass the obfuscation.

References

External links

• Experts-Exchange website