Experts Exchange also used to do that awful thing where they let Google index the solution but would hide it from visitors until they'd signed in.

I believe Google penalised them for doing it so they used another sneaky trick where they showed a obscured/pixelated answer first and then the actual one further down than most people would scroll.

SO was better in every way.

> Experts Exchange also used to do that awful thing where they let Google index the solution but would hide it from visitors until they'd signed in.

This might make someone here angry that they weren't aware of it (or make them smile):

This is how they did it:

The answers were always visible if you just scrolled far enough down the page.

At least that is how I experienced it - and I thought every oldtimer knew! :-)

No, they only started doing that after Google penalised them for underhand tactics.

There's a full description of how it worked on their Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange#Paywall

You should probably check before dishing out patronising and incorrect answers.

TIL that Experts Exchange actually existed, rather than being a meme of "why you should consider how your business name will look as a domain".

What's wrong with www.ExpertSexChange.com? People deserve to hire experts for that don't they? /s

Somewhere out there must be an RFC that discusses the original thought process behind designing for case sensitive vs case insensitive domain names, or why domains should be case insensitive while URL paths should be case sensitive... Ironically this SO post seems to be a decent starting point for my curiosity: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7996919/should-url-be-ca...

It's still around: http://www.experts-exchange.com

Their old URL doesn't redirect there (take out the dash), so it's understandable that people think it was just a meme/disappeared.

I think poor therapists suffered most from the curious nature of how domain name are. Like http://www.therapist.com/ still exists but redirects. ...

Let's not even mention the plant nursery on the Mole River which ended up with www.molestationnursery.com ...

Are we allowed to make Arrested Development references on Hacker News?

Their weekly podcast where they discussed progress on building the site that week was fascinating too.

I wouldn't give them 10x, but certainly 2-3x for junior developers compared to predecessors and 1.2x for others. Which is still incredibly significant and nothing to sneeze at.

Its closest competitor has been Quora for several years.

Stack Overflow is much better than Quora. Quora has gone downhill over the last few years with paid contributions and modal nags. It sea they will also sign me in after I click a link in their email digests. I don't know how that can be secure