The past month has been a difficult one. Between readying the apartment for winter, various chores, and social obligations, I’ve had little time for my own personal projects. Recently however I came across a few things that I just couldn’t pass up.
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.
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.