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It's the quality of the team that makes a Q&A site work
Sunday 27 May 2007, 12:04 AM
The new overall Access expert of Experts-Exchange
Congratulations to capricorn1, the new overall Access expert of Experts-Exchange.
It's great to see that after some 5 years being the #1 there's now a new #1 exactly fitting the new EE profile of "quantity and $$'s" instead of "quality and real experts".
capricorn1 reached the #1 status with "answering" almost 4500 questions (while my nico5038 account answered almost 7000 questions), this really shows that hunting points by selecting the easy 500 pointers does pay off.
Also the fact that capricorn1 became #1 Access expert by reading the Access help file, googling for answers, posting just links and copy/pasting comments from others without a reference, really shows that little needs to be known to become an expert at EE.
The fact that capricorn1 has no knowledge of Boolean logic and post a WHERE clause like:
WHERE (A and B) or (A and not b) or (not A and B)
is no obstacle to become the overall #1 Access expert.
Having no programming training or experience at all is no problem either, just pick the easy ones and ignore the harder Q's they do cost more time to answer and certainly slow down the collection of expert points.
It also helps to become friends with a Page Editor (jimhorn) and let him do the work to eliminate the ruling #1 by getting him suspended after calling him names and ignoring administrator e-mails.
The accusition from capricorn1 that I was acting like "owning" the site (when I asked him to elaborate on his comments to help the questioners) is caused by the fact that capricorn1 doesn't know the difference between being "committed" and being "involved". I started, out of commitment, to cleanup abandoned questions. Thousands of questions have been cleaned manually this way and thus rewarding experts with their points. capricorn1 always accepted the points, but never took the effort to help cleaning questions.
It's sad to see that, after being suspended, the moderators and admins did remove all links to my geocities page that held the Access samples for members I helped. Many Access experts are thus unaware of the fact that I've been suspended for five months and it shows that the freedom of speech (5th Amendment) isn't applicable for Experts-Exchange.
It's obviously common practise at EE to suspend their best experts as you can read from:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_876428.html
callrs is the "rookie of the year 2006" and suspended....
Again congratulations capricorn1, a true EE expert that's capable enough to call another expert names, refuses to respond to moderating attempts: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Community_Support/General/Q_21330288.html and never spent one minute keeping the site clean or help other experts.
I've refrained from posting these "congrats" on Experts-Exchange, as it would have been removed instantly and one of the conditions for my unsuspension was the fact that I wouldn't make critical comments to "a particular EE member".
Nic;o)
It's great to see that after some 5 years being the #1 there's now a new #1 exactly fitting the new EE profile of "quantity and $$'s" instead of "quality and real experts".
capricorn1 reached the #1 status with "answering" almost 4500 questions (while my nico5038 account answered almost 7000 questions), this really shows that hunting points by selecting the easy 500 pointers does pay off.
Also the fact that capricorn1 became #1 Access expert by reading the Access help file, googling for answers, posting just links and copy/pasting comments from others without a reference, really shows that little needs to be known to become an expert at EE.
The fact that capricorn1 has no knowledge of Boolean logic and post a WHERE clause like:
WHERE (A and B) or (A and not b) or (not A and B)
is no obstacle to become the overall #1 Access expert.
Having no programming training or experience at all is no problem either, just pick the easy ones and ignore the harder Q's they do cost more time to answer and certainly slow down the collection of expert points.
It also helps to become friends with a Page Editor (jimhorn) and let him do the work to eliminate the ruling #1 by getting him suspended after calling him names and ignoring administrator e-mails.
The accusition from capricorn1 that I was acting like "owning" the site (when I asked him to elaborate on his comments to help the questioners) is caused by the fact that capricorn1 doesn't know the difference between being "committed" and being "involved". I started, out of commitment, to cleanup abandoned questions. Thousands of questions have been cleaned manually this way and thus rewarding experts with their points. capricorn1 always accepted the points, but never took the effort to help cleaning questions.
It's sad to see that, after being suspended, the moderators and admins did remove all links to my geocities page that held the Access samples for members I helped. Many Access experts are thus unaware of the fact that I've been suspended for five months and it shows that the freedom of speech (5th Amendment) isn't applicable for Experts-Exchange.
It's obviously common practise at EE to suspend their best experts as you can read from:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_876428.html
callrs is the "rookie of the year 2006" and suspended....
Again congratulations capricorn1, a true EE expert that's capable enough to call another expert names, refuses to respond to moderating attempts: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Community_Support/General/Q_21330288.html and never spent one minute keeping the site clean or help other experts.
I've refrained from posting these "congrats" on Experts-Exchange, as it would have been removed instantly and one of the conditions for my unsuspension was the fact that I wouldn't make critical comments to "a particular EE member".
Nic;o)
Saturday 5 May 2007, 10:58 AM
Experts-Exchange is censuring expert profiles.
Found out today that the EE "staff" has censured my profile:
Link: http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_314094.html
=============================================================================================================
Expert Profile nico5038:
Co-author of "Office VBA Macros You Can Use Today"
Description : http://www.mrexcel.com/officevba2.html
Also available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932802061/103-0304489-0271823
Participated on this site for over 6 years.
As an expert :
Q's Answered 6,969 Q's Questions Participated 10,821 Q's Comments Posted 39,722 Q's
As a cleanup volunteer manually cleaned:
Access 3,220 Q's Databases 1,350 Q's Programming 900 Q's
Totals Cleanup 5,470 Q's
As a moderator (modulo and GranMod)
Q's Answered 43,548 Q's Questions Participated 72,028 Q's Comments Posted 130,238 Q's
=============================================================================================================
The final part containing the message that I switched to www.thescripts.com where experts are valued and questions are free has been removed. But even worse, they've remove my e-mail address....
This is again an attempt of the EE "staff" to silence me. After having me suspended, having deleted multiple comments, having removed over 45 links in comments to my personal www.geocities.com/nico5038 page with Access samples, this is the latest effort to silence me.
They don't act on experts that are calling other experts names, but they do take all this effort to silence me.
I feel really flattered :-)
Nic;o)
Link: http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_314094.html
=============================================================================================================
Expert Profile nico5038:
Co-author of "Office VBA Macros You Can Use Today"
Description : http://www.mrexcel.com/officevba2.html
Also available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932802061/103-0304489-0271823
Participated on this site for over 6 years.
As an expert :
Q's Answered 6,969 Q's Questions Participated 10,821 Q's Comments Posted 39,722 Q's
As a cleanup volunteer manually cleaned:
Access 3,220 Q's Databases 1,350 Q's Programming 900 Q's
Totals Cleanup 5,470 Q's
As a moderator (modulo and GranMod)
Q's Answered 43,548 Q's Questions Participated 72,028 Q's Comments Posted 130,238 Q's
=============================================================================================================
The final part containing the message that I switched to www.thescripts.com where experts are valued and questions are free has been removed. But even worse, they've remove my e-mail address....
This is again an attempt of the EE "staff" to silence me. After having me suspended, having deleted multiple comments, having removed over 45 links in comments to my personal www.geocities.com/nico5038 page with Access samples, this is the latest effort to silence me.
They don't act on experts that are calling other experts names, but they do take all this effort to silence me.
I feel really flattered :-)
Nic;o)
Wednesday 2 May 2007, 10:42 PM
Why experts work for free at Experts-Exchange ?
The answer is simple: for worthless "expert points".
The mechanism is easy as the more points an expert collects, the higher the expert shows up in the Top 15.
This Top 15 is always visible and thus getting listed gives a real ego boost...
In the past there was one "Overall Top 15", but a "Yearly Top 15" has been added to motivate new experts as it will take a shorter period of time to become visible as an expert.
It's assumed that the more points an expert has accumulated, the better the expert is. There's however a serious flaw in this assumption. The "expert points" don't show the knowledge of an expert, but the time spent at the site commenting and the success rate in posting the first "solution" a questioner thinks is right...
The downside of this "expert point" system is however that often disagreements (even flames) occur when a questioner chooses the "wrong" answer or when experts disagree among one another. The fights between the two Java top experts are well known at the site...
Why did I use in this blog title the word "work"?
Well the experts are volunteers and they generate enough $$'s for the site owners to maintain a paid staff of some 15 (or more) employees. This is the reason why all possible tricks have been built in to make visitors pay for the information. When hitting the site without being logged in the answer comment(s) can be invisible or blurred and a [Signup now] button will appear when the mouse pointer hits such a blurred comment.
To use the free access as an expert will force you to find small links at the bottom of two pages before you're able to join. Moreover, when you've reached the "free Premium expert" status, you're forced to score 3,000 points monthly to maintain this "free Premium account". When you fail you're suspended and forced to login and you need to chose explicitly for "Maintain free account" (last choice of course), to continue as an expert with limited Access.
I guess that most of the present members are indeed paying members and the last figures I saw indicated that the weekly number of new members went down from around 2,000 in January 2006 to some 1,000 in December 2006. Seeing the present rating in the alexa's list the number of visitors (and new members) will have dropped even more.
As it's almost impossible to find the entry for new experts, the number of new experts will drop and as the present quality of most experts is already at best "starting high school student" and as many old experts are quitting (see the top review at http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=experts-exchange.com&url=http://www.experts-exchange.com/) it's my guess that the site is indeed being "killed". So I have to agree with the statement from that review:
"As many reviews state, the greed and disorganization behind the site have killed the community that once made EE thrive."
The thing that bothers me most is the fact the present experts aren't aware of these "pay to view" attempts that are ruining the site. In the days that I was an expert at EE, I was always logged in and saw only the "expert mode" that skipped the ads and the [Join now] buttons. I became aware of the new way the site was run when I tried to signup a colleague at work and couldn't find the "join as an expert" link anymore. That was in 2006 and nowadays the link is even hidden more...
The mechanism is easy as the more points an expert collects, the higher the expert shows up in the Top 15.
This Top 15 is always visible and thus getting listed gives a real ego boost...
In the past there was one "Overall Top 15", but a "Yearly Top 15" has been added to motivate new experts as it will take a shorter period of time to become visible as an expert.
It's assumed that the more points an expert has accumulated, the better the expert is. There's however a serious flaw in this assumption. The "expert points" don't show the knowledge of an expert, but the time spent at the site commenting and the success rate in posting the first "solution" a questioner thinks is right...
The downside of this "expert point" system is however that often disagreements (even flames) occur when a questioner chooses the "wrong" answer or when experts disagree among one another. The fights between the two Java top experts are well known at the site...
Why did I use in this blog title the word "work"?
Well the experts are volunteers and they generate enough $$'s for the site owners to maintain a paid staff of some 15 (or more) employees. This is the reason why all possible tricks have been built in to make visitors pay for the information. When hitting the site without being logged in the answer comment(s) can be invisible or blurred and a [Signup now] button will appear when the mouse pointer hits such a blurred comment.
To use the free access as an expert will force you to find small links at the bottom of two pages before you're able to join. Moreover, when you've reached the "free Premium expert" status, you're forced to score 3,000 points monthly to maintain this "free Premium account". When you fail you're suspended and forced to login and you need to chose explicitly for "Maintain free account" (last choice of course), to continue as an expert with limited Access.
I guess that most of the present members are indeed paying members and the last figures I saw indicated that the weekly number of new members went down from around 2,000 in January 2006 to some 1,000 in December 2006. Seeing the present rating in the alexa's list the number of visitors (and new members) will have dropped even more.
As it's almost impossible to find the entry for new experts, the number of new experts will drop and as the present quality of most experts is already at best "starting high school student" and as many old experts are quitting (see the top review at http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=experts-exchange.com&url=http://www.experts-exchange.com/) it's my guess that the site is indeed being "killed". So I have to agree with the statement from that review:
"As many reviews state, the greed and disorganization behind the site have killed the community that once made EE thrive."
The thing that bothers me most is the fact the present experts aren't aware of these "pay to view" attempts that are ruining the site. In the days that I was an expert at EE, I was always logged in and saw only the "expert mode" that skipped the ads and the [Join now] buttons. I became aware of the new way the site was run when I tried to signup a colleague at work and couldn't find the "join as an expert" link anymore. That was in 2006 and nowadays the link is even hidden more...
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