Experts in spamming users
A long time ago, Experts Exchange was an often useful resource because everything on the site was accessible.
If you g00gle'd for a few keywords related to whatever problem you were having, you'd often find someone else who was dealing with the same issue and, in many cases, a solution.
Then they switched to the 'walled garden' paid model. At that point, for anyone not willing to pay their fees, Experts Exchange became a liability rather than an asset: they take up prime space in g00gle result sets, but they only offer the problem, not the solution.
Now they are effectively getting the equivalent of free Google AdWords: they get highly-ranked entries in Google's results pages for what is essentially nothing more than an advert for their service.
If I were g00gle, I might well want to do something about that.
On any g00gle e-e search result, it states "View this solution now by starting your 7-day free trial. Setting up your free trial is quick, easy, and secure. We will return you to this solution, unlocked, when you're done."
That's only in theory, because once you sign-up you will probably notice that there's no actual answer to the rare question you're asking. Instead of answers you get foolish comments or 'solutions' that have nothing to do with the asked question.
Who are the actual 'experts' ? Well, they're usually spammers. Most of the old true experts are long gone.
One has to earn 3,000 expert points per month to maintain the free premium membership. Otherwise no more premium. That actually means that they have to spam with answers for survival.
There are also a relatively large number of ex-experts that were banned from the site because of various conflicts with the moderators.
Here's what one of the real experts had to say about this:
"I’ve been participating at EE for some 6 years as an expert and I’m (have been?) the #1 MS Access expert from 2002 till 2007 answering some 7,000 Access questions and posting over 40,000 comments. I was also active as a moderator (modulo and GranMod) for 4 years and posted in that capacity over 100,000 comments.
When you think that such a track record does give you some credit you’re however at the wrong place at EE. I got called names by another member and no action was taken. When I guarded the site from the sometimes crappy comments of this member I got suspended and all links (some 40) in my comments pointing to my page holding previously Access samples and now stating my suspension were removed. (http://www.geocities.com/nico5038/) Finally asking the site owners for an explanation for this suspension gave no response at all.
The new owners have found a way to use innocent volunteers to generate a real cashcow that allows them to run an office with some 15 people and to pay the experts with worthless points that won’t even buy them a cup of Starbucks coffee.
The new interface will have costed a lot of money, but besides the better looks it doesn’t load faster, doesn’t show the questioner anymore and is another example of the foolish American idea that it’s only the outside that counts.
Finally the crappy answered questions (without a real answer and/or with broken links) aren’t getting any attention. The closure of questions to give the experts their points has the first priority as that’s what makes them coming back and getting hooked up."
Anyway, here's how to filter the junk searches on g00gle:
whenever you search for a tech-related stuff, add -site:experts-exchange.com tag to the key word(s).
Example: instead of a search for "what's my tech question", search for "what's my tech question" -site:experts-exchange.com".
The results from the junk site will then not be returned.
Looks like someone even made a dedicated junk-free site for this purpose . The site also tells you how to get rid of the site when using firefox.
For I.E., you can use this , and for Opera this one.
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Foot in the mouth for 'Experts' Exchange
The new Experts Exchange: no experts, no answers, tons of spam, tons of ads. One word for it all: FAIL !
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