Most users do not know that the site displays different content depending on the origin of the user. A user entering an experts exchange url directly will see the trial offer, someone following a link from a search engine like Google or Bing will be led to a slightly different page.

That page has the answers and solutions at the very bottom of the page. Experts Exchange do their best to hide the fact that the answers are on the page by displaying a huge category listing between the question and answers.

A signup to view the solution is displayed prominently beneath the question on each page.

experts-exchange

The Experts Exchange userscript removes the junk from their pages. It basically removes the signup request, the fake comment boxes and the directory from the website so that only the question and answers remain.

experts exchange userscript

The script has a few limitations. It is advised to visit Experts Exchange from Google or another search engine since they display the results and the answers on those pages most of the time.

The best way to handle this is to search for the title in Google and enclose it with “”. This should display the page of the Experts-Exchange site in the results.

The script is not working properly on some pages even if the site is visited from Google. It is likely that the developer will add support for those pages at a later time. Some pages at Experts Exchange seem to hide the answers completely. The script won’t be able to help in this case then.

Experts Exchange can be downloaded from the userscripts resource site. It is fully compatible with the Firefox web browser and likely to work in Google Chrome and other userscript compatible browsers as well.

Users who do not stop here and turn their back on the forum in frustration can actually access the answers quite easily without having to use third party services or changing their web browser’s configuration. What many users fail to realize that the answers are right in front of them, or more precisely right at the end of the scrollbar.

The Experts Exchange forum uses a very clever forum disguise to make visitors think that they can only access the answers if they signup as the banners and information directly below the question suggest. If they happen to scroll down further however they will realize that all the answers are located below that block.

There is one requirement though. Only visitors who are coming from search engines will be able to see the answers this way. There is however a quick and easy way of achieving this. Copying and pasting the title of the thread into a search engine form will do the trick. The posts at the Experts Exchange forum are usually well indexed and one of the first entries should be a direct link to that forum post.

A click on that link will open the Experts Exchange page with the question and its answers which are located below the middle block.

All you need to do is the following. Search for something, e.g. printing from a website, the search string you would enter would look like the following.

printing from a website site:experts-exchange.com

Please note that it is not necessary to use the site:experts-exchange.com parameter, this is only done for demonstration purposes.

The first search result will link directly to the experts-exchange.com article with no solution but a button stating View Solution. If you click that button you see that you will have to subscribe to view the solution. Not today though.

Go back to the Google results page and click on Cached which loads a cached version of that webpage. Guess what ? The cached page holds all the answers to the question right at the bottom. Just scroll down and see for yourself.