Viewing Expert-Exchange comments without an account
One of those things that can get really annoying after a few times, is clicking one of the searchresults in your favorite search-engine, which will navigate you to a site that then shows you that you need to signup. It happens to me everytime with Experts-Exhange.com. They manage to get their pages indexed by the Google crawler, so searching for some technical keywords will often result in links to Experts-Exchange. Most of the time I don't even look at the domain that a result comes from, I just look at the title and the compact piece of information in which my keywords were found. When I then happen to click a link of Experts-Exchange.com, I can read the problem-statement without problems, but then after scrolling a bit down to the answers of other forum-members, I see that all of that content has been scrambled to avoid me from reading that without paying a fee for the site... The first time that happened I was just impressed and laughed about it a little bit... but then when I keeps happening over-and-over again it gets quite annoying. Keeping the Dutch spirit alive (ons ben zunig) I refuse to signup for an account.
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When hovering over the individual answers, you get a signup-alert:
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I thought at first that signing up was for free, but clicking the link shows the following prices:
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Well.. it's easy to save money on this... I happened to try what happens when (in Google) I clicked the "In Cache" link and I must say I was kind-of surprised! It took me to the unscrambled version of the page!
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Clicking that showed me exactly the same page as before with 1 difference: it's not scrambled anymore! Here's a screendump of the accepted answer (does not happen to contain the technical solution, but you can see the text is readable... so are all other posts).
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My explanation for this "feature" :-) is that the Experts-Exchange page will not get scrambled when it detects the Googlebot crawler, as they want ALL TEXT to get indexed, so their posts will show up as search-results. That way, Google can easily index all content without any scrambling. When you as a regular visitor will go to that same page, scrambling gets enabled as you have a useragent that sounds like MSIE or Mozilla. This will probably work with many newspaper-sites as well who open up their articles for members only.
Anyway, I know now that whenever I click an Experts-Exchange link from the Google-results, I will go back and use the In Cache option to avoid the malformed contents on the next page. Maybe this happened to you as well, in that case you could take your advantage with this.
UPDATE June 28th 2007 @ 22:26 GMT+1
Sander had a great comment to this post which is worth while mentioning here. You could also add the Experts-exchange domain (with optional subdomain wildcard) to the list of restricted sites (assuming you're using Internet Explorer). This will cause the scramble script to be disabled, showing you all comments without any problems. Thanks Sander for the tip.
UPDATE July 24th 2007 @ 12:26 GMT+1
Unfortunately Sander's tip does not work any more. When you now visit Expert-Exchange, also all words in the comments are mixed up. So even when you look at the unscrambled text, you will still see meaningless words. So, using the Google Cache option now seems like the only way to read the comments successfully.
UPDATE June 3rd 2008 @ 12:37 GMT+1
For several weeks now Expert's Exchange is "publicly" viewable. Indeed when you just scroll down the answers are there, readable just fine. In both MSIE7 and FF. So it seems this post became obsolete.