What is Experts Exchange?
If you’ve ever tried to look up some sort of technical information on the internet, you’ve likely come across the Experts Exchange. Experts Exchange is a site on which people can ask questions about a variably infinite number of technical topics and receive a range of answers from experts purported experts.
The site then allows the user to select a “best answer” earning the answer’s author extra points. Points can be redeemed for a better type of account and access to other things on the site.
In this way the site is user supported, without the experts there would be no exchange of answers.
What’s your problem with Experts Exchange?
As an incentive to sign up, the questions asked on experts exchange are visible to all, however, the answers are obscured in two rather tricky ways.
As a person just looking for the answer to my question I’m often frustrated by the number of times I stumble across an experts exchange thread which might answer my question, but is obscured.
What are you going to do about it?
Well I hate to be bothered with unnecessary prompts to log in as much as the next guy. With that in mind, I present to you:
The Unhide Experts Exchange Greasemonkey Script
This script does what it says, it removes the image which blurs the answer text, and then Rot13 decrypts the answers for your viewing pleasure.
As the title implies, you will need to be using Firefox, and you will need the Greasemonkey plug-in to use this script.
Will this destroy Experts Exchange?
For those of you worried that this might just ruin the Experts Exchange, fear not. In their infinite wisdom they decided to completely omit the “selected answers” for the questions unless you’re logged in.
In this way there is still incentive to get an account and contribute!
In addition, I do not believe that my little Greasemonkey script will ever gain enough momentum to offset a significant portion of potential Experts Exchange visitors. If it ever did, all they would have to do is change their cypher or insert dummy text.
Any change to the cypher algorithm will be taken as a hint. (Also I’m way too lazy to implement anything other than rot13 instead of just logging in.)
However, if you’re as lazy as I (or rather as lazy as one needs to be to write a Greasemonkey script to avoid logging in…), and would prefer not to manage yet another user name and password combination, you may use the script above.
Note: The Greasemonkey script was updated on Sunday August 12th at 1:00am. It now properly takes care of the <br> characters that they do not rot13.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Coding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: encryption, experts-exchange, JavaScript, rot13
I would actually recommend this for casual people who visit Experts Exchange. I think EE provides a great service, and by blocking all the content to new visitors is probably doing them a disservice. Sure the answers will need to be hidden if they want users to sign up… but blocking regular content gives first time visitors no indication of the quality of the comments provided by EE experts, which in my experience has always been great.
As for your script, its very well written! Clean and concise code. I learned some things by checking out the script’s source. I used it as a template for my first few Greasemonkey scripts.
I agree that EE is doing itself a disservice by preventing the casual user from seeing the quality of its content. Great, useful script – and well written, too!
Thanks Jay, glad you enjoyed it. I definitely think Experts Exchange would do themselves a huge favor by just exposing the answers which were not selected as the final answer.
I can understand why they would want to hide the answers as part of their business model, but it just seems so counter productive.
Thank you for providing this useful script. I tried it but it looks that there are some answers still unreadable.
For example:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Web_Languages/JavaScript/Q_21776703.html
The answers after the ads could not readable. Not sure if it is related to the script.
@bonitoyu
Thanks for visiting and I’m glad you enjoyed the script.
Unfortunately, as described in the blog post, Experts Exchange replaces the “approved answer” with an advertisement to join Experts Exchange if you aren’t logged in.
Because of this you will never be able to view the “approved answer” without getting an Experts Exchange account.
Because Experts Exchange doesn’t physically output the accepted answer there’s nothing my (or any) Greasemonkey script could do to help in those situations.
Sorry.
Looks like they’re really active at Experts-Exchange as they now have stopped the blurring and replaced all comments by a “signup” message: —————————————- All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only. Sign-up to view the solution to this question.
Already a member? Login to view this solution. —————————————- After that All the Topic Area’s are displayed and then at the bottom the “normal” comments are available so Google can’t exclude them because of cloaking…
Guess your script needs now to remove the first set of comments and the TopicArea list…
For more issues with Experts-Exchange you’re invited to read my Blog: http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,2000342184b,00.htm
As a free cumbersome alternative you might checkout http://www.TheScripts.com where more and more “old” EE experts are joining.
Nic;o)
@nico5038:
I’m actually glad they’ve covered the content. At least now their site is a little more honest about what they want to provide to the normal unregistered user.
Because the free content now shows the same as their site’s intentions I have no reason to play with it any further.
I’m glad the script was of some use for some while though.
Thanks for reading.
[...] strategy. Where they would once display the normal solutions to a question hidden under a weak rot13 encryption, they have finally chosen to hide the articles all out unless one signs up for an [...]
Use Firefox + following extensions: 1. NoScript – disallow all scripts on experts-exchange 2. CookieSafe – disallow all cookies from experts-exchange
Just scroll right down below the scrambled answers and the linkfarm.
They also have the accepted answer marked.
it’s not working now @ 26 May 2008, the answers are in mess. Maybe they change the cipher algorithm
@bypasser
They no longer cypher their answers. After the article they output “hidden” answers, then some adds. After the advertisements they output the full answers in plain text.
Cheers.
[...] recent fun with JavaScript at work and a co-workers really neat Greasemonkey script for Revealing Experts Exchange comments propelled me to write this very simple script. Mine pales in comparison to CoderJoe’s EE [...]
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