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Anyone use Expert's Exchange?
Written By Ozone42 on Apr. 4, 2008.
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Developer roll call.
I always run into niggly little rarely documented bugs, or worse, I try to do things in a way that isn't done. I get stuck. I have no one to turn to and ask "hey joe, does that event block this one?" I end up spending a lot of time building in tests so that I can find the answer instead of being able to easily reference it and just know. It's always a matter of some obscure detail, rarely used syntax, etc. I can occasionally find the answers I'm looking for in a reference book, but those are rarely organized in a fashion where it's quick to get to what I want.
Googling I often come across experts-exchange.com (convenient hyphen.) Before they went to a pay site I had an account and would occasionally find the answer I was looking for there. More often I just came across a dozen other people running into exactly the same problem, but no answer. If their move to a pay site has improved I really wouldn't mind shelling out the money, but before I do that I was wondering if anyone knew if it was worth it. They want a credit card to sign up for the free trial so I'm a bit hesitant.
Better yet, how about some free forums? Most of my work is web based lately so I'm focused on php, js, sql, throw in some design work html, css, svg, and now iPhone work with objective c.
Years ago when I was in school there were programmer forums everywhere. People would show cool tricks, optimizations, solutions to classic puzzles, etc. Now I can't seem to find any.
Oli
Written Apr. 4, 2008 / Report /
Don't do it. I used to be a volunteer expert there. I was ranked #1 in Webdev in their 2007 awards. I'm just saying that to give you an idea of how committed I was to EE.
EE only cares about one thing: money. At the end of 2006, they brought in new management or something and they decided it would be an ace time for a redesign. I can't fault them on that point because the old design was a little bleurgh, but they replaced it with 500k of images.
They provide a slimmer template without all the nasty pop-up adverts on every page at a cost. You either need to be a VIP Expert (as I was) or be a paying member.
I found out about their redesign a couple of months before it was released and posted a thread in their general chat about it, offering lots of feedback. Many other VIPs offered their feedback too - genuinely constructive stuff. EE rewarded me by blocking my account for 4 days.
I tried to ask why I had been blocked in their site support section and my thread was deleted. I asked again. Deleted. I started asking other members and moderators directly and they all had one thing to say: management is fucking EE up. Many of them knew member that had offered some constructive criticism, just to find themselves being screamed at by one of the hired moderators - so left.
After the design nonsense, I left, my membership lapsed and I never visit EE any more. And about the same time, they dropped completely out of the search engines (at least a lot lower than they used to be) so they're a complete non-entity to me.
Bytes (formerlly TheScripts), though I've never used it, looks like a much better model. They don't fuck you over when you're looking for answers and they seem to reward membership better. Many EE members I knew went over to TheScripts.
IRC (freenode) is also a good bet for the simpler issues.
Ozone42
Written Apr. 4, 2008 / Report /
Wow. That's ridiculous. Great information, thank you.
posure
Written Apr. 4, 2008 / Report /
I don't go there regularly, but EE does come up a lot when searching for obscure developer issues. A nice trick is that if you pull up the Google cache for any EE page, you will get the full content of the page without paying for it. I'd agree with Oli though, its not as good as it used to be.
If you're looking to ask questions, then I'm not aware of many places (I can usually find the answer if I'm having trouble with something).
thame
Written Apr. 5, 2008 / Report /
I hate that they so often rank at the top of Google's search results when they're obviously gaming the system since their content is only made available to the bots and not people. Google should block them or at least penalize them somehow...didn't know about that trick though, thanks posure.