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Experts-Exchange

Experts-Exchange (EE), founded in 1996, is 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.

In Experts-Exchange, users are awarded with points for answering questions asked by other users. This results in a competition for obtaining more points. Those who obtain 3,000 points each month are given access to all features of the web site, known as premium services. Premium services are also available by payment.

Experts-Exchange went bankrupt in 2001. Austin Miller and Randy Redberg took ownership of Experts-Exchange afterwards and the company was made profitable again. Experts-Exchange has more than 2 million solutions now. Experts-Exchange has mostly been among the top 1500 visited websites in the first 6 months of 2008, based on Alexa's rank. It's users are mainly young to middle-aged males.

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. However, members with premium services subscription often assign the maximum point value to their simple or intermediate questions.

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. 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.

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, including simply scrolling to the bottom of the page where the answers are visible.

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.

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.

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 fee-based subscription, as well as by accumulating sufficient points (10,000) and maintaining minimum points over time (3,000 per month). 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.

Users buying premium services can cancel their subscription upon their decision; this has to be done before the next billing date.

History

Originally, the name and URL of the site was expertsexchange.com but this created confusion and ridicule as many users intrepreted it as Expert-Sex-Change as opposed to Experts-Exchange. Subsequently, the URL was changed to experts-exchange.com.

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. 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 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. 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, which can be useful to users with low bandwidth.

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).

On 13 November 2007, the number of solutions on Experts-Exchange reached 2,000,000. Experts-Exchange ran a competition from almost a month before that date. The competition was announced on Experts-Exchange web site and its newsletter. 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.

On 3 January 2008, it was announced that an Expert has reached 20,000,000 points in total and 18,000,000 points in one zone. Both of these values were the most in Experts-Exchange to date.

Reception

Experts-Exchange has been praised as one of the best technical support sites by some of its reviewers. PC Magazine lists Experts-Exchange as one of the top 101 websites.

Different views are expressed in reviews written by Amazon.com users about Experts-Exchange . While some users have found it easy to answer a couple of questions and get free premium access to the web site, others have found Experts-Exchange results in search engine searches annoying. Some search engine users have been frustrated that a large number of Experts Exchange results appear in response to technical queries, but the pages are apparently not available without payment; at the time, there was no way to view the solutions except by creating an account, or scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Controversy

It has been frequently alleged on various web bulletin boards that Experts-Exchange engages regularly in questionable tactics to deceive potential customers. Previously, Experts-Exchange showed a different content for its pages when they were crawled by search engine spiders. This was considered a form of cloaking, which is considered a violation of most search engines' terms of service.

In 2005, a Greasmonkey script was published on the internet which would hide results from Experts-Exchange website from Google search results, when installed. Comments on this script are controversial, especially because there are a few ways to get to Experts-Exchange's answers without subscribing to the web site.