Experts-Exchange Sucks More, Employing Obfuscation to Force Signup

Which isn’t to say I find Experts Exchange dot Com not to be completely worthless, rife with mostly worthless “experts” and an obscene amount of ads. Thankfully, they’ve taken the first step towards pulling the plug on their worthless site by forcing you to register to view any threads that appear in Google. In Konqueror, when I hover over any answer, JavaScript is used to blur it so it is unreadable. In a more recent browser, I imagine the answers are completely hidden on page load. Exports Exchange, I raise my glass to your eventual extinction. Keep up the great work!

10 Comments

  1. nico5038
    Posted 4/21/2007 at 6:26 pm | Permalink

    Well worded Jason. I’ve published a blog on the decline of EE (http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,2000342184b,00.htm) and seing them going down lately even more.

    The site has been ruined in first instance by owners spilling 5Mb without income going bankrupt and now it’s ruined by the new owners that are only interested in $$’s.
    I’ve been suspended last December because I was concerned about the expert quality and the administrators didn’t took any action when another “expert” was calling me names.
    I guess they’re one of the only sites having a “suspended-experts” site :-)

    Cheers.

    Nic;o)

  2. nyx
    Posted 5/23/2007 at 5:02 pm | Permalink

    I couldn’t agree more.
    I wish the “experts” would just stick to posting actual solutions rather than random and often unrelated suggestions. Some seem to have only racked up points by posting the most irritating suggestion of all; “install the latest service pack…” or another favorite “update your graphics driver”. After more useless prattle, sometimes a real solution is posted.

  3. Bill Jonston
    Posted 1/3/2008 at 9:45 pm | Permalink

    Has anyone else found their business practices questionable? I signed up for a trial subscription, along with a 6 month followup. Not finding anything useful there, I canceled the plan on the day that the trial period ended. The company indicated that I canceled one day after the trial ended, and would be liable for the membership fee. When I asked them for the company president’s name, they gave me the run around, and refused to provide the info. I’m now disputing the charge with my credit card.

    Has anyone else found any ethical problems with the way that they do business? How about any Better Business Bureau problems, or complaints with the Attorney General?

    Bill

  4. john
    Posted 2/6/2008 at 1:06 pm | Permalink

    expert sex change…
    let them use the domain for what it was intended

  5. John Goodhue
    Posted 2/27/2008 at 12:10 am | Permalink

    Bill, I cancelled on the last day of the trial and now they will not refund the $99.95 charge. They say I cancelled after the free trial, eventhough the email says the trial ended on 2/22/08. I cancelled on the 22nd. They said it really ended in the 21st. This company is going to fail.

  6. joebob
    Posted 9/30/2008 at 2:20 pm | Permalink

    You don’t have to register to view the results. They put all the answers at the very bottom of the page, unfettered. I assume this is because they were having trouble getting indexed by search engines.

  7. Jonathan Weyermann
    Posted 10/10/2008 at 11:37 pm | Permalink

    I signed up for a 7 day trial and put the billing to monthly, in case i forgot to cancel, and found nothing useful at the site. Well, i never really found anything useful on the site so i was trying to cancel it, except they already billed me for a whole year, when i clearly selected the 1 month term.

  8. Cliff Bamford
    Posted 11/9/2008 at 9:09 pm | Permalink

    I was searching for an answer to a specific question about error handling in VBA (yeah, I know, I deserve whatever I get for using VBA in the first place). Anyway, I googled and found exactly the right question on Experts Exchange (which sucks). I signed up for one month to see the answer, which was five words long — and Wrong! I immediately asked for a refund and was told no dice — because my credit card had been used to open a different account. What a bunch of losers.

    WHat we need to do is start complaining to google.

    I have written to

  9. entactogen
    Posted 11/22/2008 at 1:07 pm | Permalink

    Thank you, joebob!
    I never considered subscribing to expert-exchange since usually I found the answers to my questions
    somewhere else. But after a day of failing to solve a problem that only e-e seemed to offer a solution for I was close to subscribing… When checking out their business I came across this blog and Alas! - you are right! The answers are on the page - just never bothered to scroll down :-D
    To imagine I almost subscribed for such a crappy solution!

  10. entactogen
    Posted 11/22/2008 at 1:12 pm | Permalink

    Oh well… I did subscribe.
    http://www.experts-exchange.com/registerFree2.jsp

    LMAO

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