{"id":72,"date":"2007-07-25T17:45:20","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T21:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whoisgregg.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/experts-exchange-are-cloaking-asshats.html"},"modified":"2007-07-25T17:45:20","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T21:45:20","slug":"experts-exchange-are-cloaking-asshats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/experts-exchange-are-cloaking-asshats\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts Exchange are cloaking asshats"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s rare that I get personally frustrated by cloaking. After all, I expect<\/i> those types of shenanigans from Web -2.0 companies like the New York Times.<\/p>\n

But Experts Exchange? Holy crap, do they expect to not just frustrate people by literally scrambling the text of answers until you register?<\/p>\n

An [screenshot of scrambling shenanigans](http:\/\/whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/picture-60.png) ([Actual URL](http:\/\/www.experts-exchange.com\/Programming\/Languages\/Scripting\/JavaScript\/Q_21107867.html)):
\n\"Experts<\/a><\/p>\n

See how they cleverly position a semi-transparent GIF over the scrambled text to heighten the illusion of inconvenience? Of course, if we delve deeper we learn that the scrambled text is using a highly idiotic encryption cipher, [ROT13](http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ROT13).<\/p>\n

No, no, they save the really clever programming for the cloaking of the unscrambled content to search engines. Oh yeah, [***that’s*** what that page is supposed to look like](http:\/\/64.233.167.104\/search?q=cache:9Iqeuymw9kEJ:www.experts-exchange.com\/Programming\/Languages\/Scripting\/JavaScript\/Q_21107867.html+javascript+sort+list&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us). I guess Googlebot forked over the $12.95 a month to see giant animated banner ads for eBay and MSN Live.<\/p>\n

Let’s face it, Experts Exchange has always been a horrific hodgepodge of self-advertisements. I’m quite certain the first dozen or so times I visited the site I never even finished the multipage scrolling trek to the first “comment,” thinking the site only existed to offer “questions” while cross-promoting it’s other services. Even the new redesign is still chock full o’ self-love.<\/p>\n

If I had more time I’d write the Greasemonkey script to disable that transparent gif and rot13 the comments back to being readable. But, honestly, I think I’d rather just never visit their site again.<\/p>\n

Good luck with your re-design Experts Exchange!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s rare that I get personally frustrated by cloaking. After all, I expect those types of shenanigans from Web -2.0 companies like the New York Times. But Experts Exchange? Holy crap, do they expect to not just frustrate people by literally scrambling the text of answers until you register? An [screenshot of scrambling shenanigans](http:\/\/whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/picture-60.png) ([Actual…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,5,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whoisgregg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}