Experts Exchange Part 2

It would seem that Experts Exchange has changed their free access 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 account.

I for one welcome the change. Since it was their intention to only provide answers to registered users in the first place, moving away from obfuscated text helps clarify the site’s goals.

As a result of this site change I’ve been asked by a number of anonymous visitors to my site to rewrite my script to fetch the answers to an article so they don’t have to log in. I would like to make it clear that given the sites new design, that a script to display the answers is no longer possible. As such no effort will be put forth to do so.

Sorry to anybody who had their hopes up, but you can’t un-hide what isn’t there.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 4:41 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.
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5 Responses to “Experts Exchange Part 2”

  1. Sean Says:
    October 29th, 2007 at 11:16 am

    A quick tip on how I get around their lockouts…

    So that their answers get indexed by google, they let googlebot access their full-answser pages.

    This has the pleasant side-effect that if you click on “cached” in the search results on google for an article, you get the full text (and it’s not rot13).

    Hope that helps someone :)

  2. coderjoe Says:
    October 29th, 2007 at 11:39 pm

    @Sean:

    Well that puts a whole new spin on things. Those results could easily be included using an AJAX Request and a search/replace.

    Thanks for the tip!

  3. Mike Lin Says:
    November 13th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    The answers are there in the page when you go to it normally too. They’re right at bottom after the big mess of links. The difference is in the google cache the obfuscated answers are missing.

    You’d think that google would disallow showing different content to the googlebot than to regular visitors.

  4. coderjoe Says:
    November 13th, 2007 at 7:35 pm

    @Mike:

    Absolutely true. However given EE’s past history I still feel it necessary to provide alternative methods for retrieving the information.

    In addition I still feel their practices are misleading and as such I’ll continue to provide methods to clear up any confusion caused by their site design.

    Again, however, you are absolutely correct.

  5. The Dude Says:
    May 29th, 2009 at 11:54 am

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46195

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