Experts Round Table Network

Hi,

I am fairly active on EE.... I recently spent some time looking through some old dialog in some of COBOLDinosaurs later postings and "conversations" with the mods..which eventually led me here out of curiosity....My question is simple, whilst I am taking no sides at all, I wonder exactly what the issue is with people firing up at EE? I mean, its a Forum like anywhere else, it just has a more known name, and a point system that motivates for challenge...why have so many members left on bad terms?

Welcome to ERT.  : )

There is no simple answer to that question, but for myself, it is the old story of Management vs Workers, with a dash of "Power corrupts..." thrown in.

While I still answer Q's  over there, it's nowhere near as much as I used to.
I spend a lot of time in the Lounge now, working on my Cert.  : )

Hey Coral,

I recognised your name from EE, I guess i never thought much of the worker Vs Management side of things, guess it tends to affect other some people more than others.

How far off the lounge Cert are you, Man, That would take years to get!

I still have 14,583  poinks to go.
That will tie me with shekerra, with 5 Certs ( a private fight.  ; )     )

>> That would take years to get!

It wasn't so bad before they capped the poink limit at 50.   : /

Lol funny times....what do you think of this Forum where it is smaller and a lot less in your face than EE?

I left after unfair treatment and fascist behaviour from Computer101, admin_something and a lot of unsupport from WesLennon
I only stayed one year
I entered the top-100 ("hall of fame") and was first  Guru in Mysql and PHP, not counting Pascal, Delphi, Windows, Hardware and Databases areas.

ffor me, EE.COM is a place where a few fil in their pockets with the money put in by "askers", whom Questions are answered by benevolent idiots like me.

now I do the same 100% free of any constraint and in better technical environment (no more sluggish JSP pages...) on http://www.europeanexperts.org

if you like EE.COM, you should like ERT and EEE.org ;-)

VGR,

Cheers mate, I am on that site now having a browse...I guess i had never really looked at the fact that people are making money out of the work we do..I spend a copius amount of tie on that site as an "expert" a PE and a CV....guess if i charged for the time that ispent on there i would have a nice pocket of cash :)

I have been on there just over a year now like you and have noticed there has been loads of battles with some of the top experts and it always seems to come back to the same points so i guess there must be some truth to it, I entered the top 50 a couple of weeks ago, wonder how long till i get up there and start yelling too! lol!

Can i ask what you alias was on EE (or if you prefer to keep it personal, i can understand that)

Ha after asking that question, common sense kicked in and i found your user on EE :)

Everyone who has left did so for various personal reasons.  I left quite simply because the owner of the site is a lying greedy son of a bitch.

When he bought the site out of bankruptcy he asked me to form an Experts Advisory Board to help him get the site back up.  In exchange for that he made promises and commitments about the treatment of experts which he did not keep. He made promises about the quality of the free version of the site that he did not keep.  He screwed Ken Bell, the guy who put together the Google connection that gave us the traffic we needed.  He lied to the Board, the experts, the community, and the paid members.

When the Board refused to endorse unlimited points for paid premium, he terminated the relationship, but did not let the Community know until two months later, tht they no longer had any representation.

As for the admins the dishonesty must have been contagious because they were lying doing the admin stuff for free when they in fact were on the payroll.  Threads were altered by admins to frame individuals and get them banned. Certain editors and senior members were exempted from flaming rules when the admins wanted someone beaten up in Community support.

As for teh EE vs ERT thing.  That does not exist.  EE is a trowback to old style forums that are dying all over the WEb.  They are the only site I know of that has a Greasemonkey scritp to filter them out of Google results, and they are just a game not a tech support site.

What I have developed on the ERT content side give Experts who are interested in actually helping instead of playing a game ad free, high profile exposure.  An article on ERT draws more traffic from Google in a week than any link posted on EE gets in a year, on most of our keywords we come up ahead or EE in the SERPS.  However we don't have to beat them; most of the EE crap that comes up on the same page as us cannot match the quality of ERT content.  It is like comparing silk to burlap to gravel.

There is no EE vs ERT.  They are yesterday's newspaper. ERT is not in competition with anyone because tech support and education is not a game.

I have been asked three times to come back.  I have made it clear that will not happen until Austin appologizes to me and the Community and keeps teh commitments he made when we help bring the site back from bankruptcy... don't hold your breath.

Cd&

Oh, and when I was banned on direct orders from Austin.  The deleted the comments about me being banned; for 3 months lied about it, saying I had left voluntarily; suspended other experts who pointed out the lie and supported ERT.

I am here. Helping in my limited ability to build ERT. And having fun doing it.   : )

Speaking of which, I have 2 articles and a Second Hand Bytes to finish up. Got to keep the bots fed.  : D

Wow, that puts it pretty much out there....I had no idea that sort of crap had been going on, until i started looking through some of the big names on the sites profiles and started to see some pretty hectic arguments....

I meant no disrespect when i made the title of EE Vs ERT, I just wanted some clarification on why things go haywire.....

Sooo...whats to go on this site with helping out? I am not too bad with Networking and Operating Systems, and wouldnt mind offering a hand here and there if you like.....

I would suggest writing an article for the .COM part of our site to get started.  That might generate some interest in your areas of expertise.  Also you could submit a Mentor profile to me or one of the other admins, which would then be posted on the .COM part of our site.

yes (write an article to draw attention to your areas). Especially if the areas in which you feel competent are not very active. Else you can just drop in and begin to answer questions and help people out ;-)
like on ee.com :D
welcome and best regards

Thanks :)

Forgive my ignorance but what sort of article?

There was no offense taken.  Just the normal overreaction form a dinosaur who drinks to much coffee. There was a time when a comparison to EE would have been seen as a huge compliment by any of us.


If you have been answering questions and participating in discussion, then you probably already know things that are not common knowledge.  You also have the communication skill to deliver your thoughts. 

All an article or tutorial represents is a longer, sometimes more detailed answer. The members who have written ERT content, have done it because they have been shown a more effective way to help users.  An answer in a forum has a short active life.  An article has a very long active life, and can be kept up to date.  For example Matt did an article about tabs in Firefox.  When Firefox 2.0 was released he sent me an update and I added it to the article, and pushed an update sitemap to Google. http://www.expertsrt.com/articles/Matt/IE-FF-tabs.html

There are three hard things about doing your first article:

[1] Understanding what you know and can help others with.
[2] Sitting down and starting to write.
[3] Letting someone else see the work.

We have all had to handle those three things, so there is a group here who are very supportive of each other and everyone else developing material.  You already know what you know.  You know what things you have answers for, and you know where to look to expand your knowledge in those areas.  Every sentence you write makes the next one easier.  An article is just he same as answer with more detail and style.  Rod answers the question "can you write files with Javascrpt in an article:
http://www.expertsrt.com/tutorials/Rod/JSread.php that has been viewed over 10,000 times

Matt answers "Can perl modules be comopiled into executables" with an article:
http://www.expertsrt.com/tutorials/Matt/perlPAR.html

VGR answers "How do I get the frame rate from FLASH" in his latest article which is featured on the ERT home page: http://www.expertsrt.com/articles/VGR/SWF-Frame-Rate-Extraction.html

Once an article has been written there comes the unique part of the ERT experience.  The other Mentors collaborate with you through advice help and criticism to improve the piece.  There are no deadlines.  You post in the content submisson forum.  Huntress moves it up on to the site for proof reading and editing for spelling and grammar.  The other members, discuss it with you.  There are some great threads in the content submission area that center around submissions.  When the author of a piece is happy with it; then I take it and work with you to develop a layout and presentation you are happy with. We keep improving the process of getting it nice oan on the site, and the site keeps geting better, but the center of everything is the content produced by Mentors who want to help others.

From there it goes on the site, and within the first few days it will get indexed by Google, have the link bookmarked on the major bookmark sites, get intoroduced on the social news and information sites, and will have its first outside visitors.  It will then develop steady traffic; it might be a big hit on Digg, Dzone or StumbleUpon and generate thousands of visitors in a few days; even if it doesn't the link to it will end up being posted on blogs and in forums across the Internet because it "answers a question", and it educates.

Every single article on ERT comes up top 10 in the search engines for their keywords.  On average there is a user looking at an ERT page every 3.6 minutes 24/7; from 120+ countries.  Links to that content are on pages that I not only can't read, I don't even know what language they are in.  All because ERT pages have information that helps people.

If you want to try that you will find you get a lot of support.  If you want to help out with questions you will get support for that.  The forum is not very busy but there have been some great discussion and solutions.  If you want to just handg out ans see what is going on you will get support for that too.

shorter starter answer ;-))

you could start from a topic in those areas and turn a long thread into a compact article
this way you can credit all contributors (or even make as if the article was written by all of them, a solution I never saw used so far)

this requires an active area of knowledge, so it's not probably the ideal starting point for you ***now***, but it's the most common IMHO :D

suggestion : turn a winning thread on EE.COM into a nice article on ERT.net ;-)))))))
winning = you got the Answer and the Poinks

I think I like this place. Let me have a read through a couple of the current articles and have a think about how I will go with it all.

Thank you both for your kind and warm welcome to the site

you wake up early, or you live very far from me :D

to complete my suggestion and CD& 's answer, one other starting point is to apply this procedure :
- you encounter a real tough problem in real life (IT related, of course)
- you google a lot to find out thezre's no ready-made solution
- you immediately think "this would be a winner article"
- you solve it ***by documenting all failed and successful attempts, with details***
- you renice this into an article
- you post in "content submission" for a peer review from ERT's experts (in case some understand what you write about, or can comment on readability, correctness etc)
- the article gets "accepted" in a definitive form and the nice people from here make it available on ert.com (brother site)
- you become famous
- you're no longer a loser :D


that's how I wrote all my articles, including the "how to get the frame rate from a SWF movie ?" ;-)

lol! I like it :) I live in Australia, Sydney to be specific, I am a Network Engineer so i come across PITA issues constantly - shouldnt be too hard to find one :)

absolutely :D

[MODE JOKE ON]
You live in Australia ?
So you're a Loser for life
Don't even hope to become famous
Except if you grow a third arm due to radiations ;-)
[MODE JOKE OFF]

(after thinking about it a bit, I'm not sure my humour can translate in English, so be indulgent oh Mighty Aussie ;-)

I had a funny feeling when i wrote that, that it might land me some bagging! All is well....Ill just get a couple or Kanagaroos on you.... :)

If you want to try the "make an article from a thread" route, this is an early attempt at testing the idea.

The thread link is in the article, and the discussion is in the Content Submission section.

http://www.expertsrt.com/articles/coral/window-find-file.html

While this is not a "set" format/style, it will give you an idea of how to get from point A to point B.

Enjoy and have fun.   : )

I don't know if it's your cup of tea, but thinking about "network operations" and "hardware", I thought that one interesting (and completely virgin on the Net) domain could be the comparison of the technical value of the different network adapters (called "ADSL modems" by beotians), branded all over the xworld under commercial names.

For instance, in France you can find different "boxes" named Freebox (www.free.fr, the best, the first, the original [2002]), and the copies named Livebox (France Telecon/Wanamou), Dartybox (wholesale reseller), Neufbox (idem), AOLbox, Alicebox which are in fact adapters like Hitazchi or Sagem CT633. In Belgium there is the ScarletBox that I know : it's a different network adapter

It would be interesting to show people the technical implications of the choice.

I don't know if it's feasible for you, but that's certainly something interesting.

A good example of the article life-cycle on ERT.

This is the link to the content submission thread where is started in June:
http://www.expertsrt.net/main/forum/topic,860.0/

It finally went on to the site on October 13th.

It has had 931 views.  There is not a single day when it has not had a view.  The hits to it come from 18 different sources where the link has been posted and the visitors to it have come from 56 different countries.  By ERT standards it is still a young article, but it has established a base that generates a steady daily flow of trafic.  It comes up in Google searches every day and it will go on helping for a long time.

The initial effort to do the article is more than the effort to answer a question, but I doubt you will find a forum thread on EE or any other forum that has that kind of long term positive effect.  A year from now that article will still be helping, and it will continue to come up in the search engines because it is nicely optimized for SEs and part of what Google and other advanced SEs do is raise the rating of a page over time based on how many user click it when it does come up.

The trick is getting enough initial presentation to get onto Google's radar, and I seem to know how to do that.  So far none of the pages on ERT have failed.  That says something about the quality.  It says something about the relevance. It says something about the way I have been promoting articles the we put on the site.

There is no forum including EE that can match performance on top content.  The top thread on EE right now is:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Applications/Email/Q_21834470.html
With 40,115 views since May 2006

The top article on ERT is:
http://www.expertsrt.com/tutorials/Matt/install-apache.html
with 68,282 views since June 2006

and no one has to pay to see that article, or tolerate ads to access the site.

I agree with the previous comments, EE's politics are horrible.  They don't show the answers to the questions unless you are registered, and show you a bunch of adverts instead.  The Greasemonkey script is a good proof of the poor quality of the information you can find on EE.  The posts are just a buch of repeating copy/paste or just some links that come straight out of Google.  EE is just a free helpdesk, not a place designed for sharing knowledge.

this said, I always saw the answers via the google cache

That's a good description.  : )
 

I was suspended for merely asking a fellow PHP expert if you wanted to join my PHP team, at which the admins pounced on me about it saying I was recruiting for ERT where in fact there was no postings of that sort. So saying it was for ERT was a blind assumption by the admins, not only did I not get to plea about my suspension they decided to even delete my EE profile contents including where I posted that I was available for PHP work. That job availability post was not at all breaking any rules but it was deleted out of malice. Shows how far EE admin corruption has gone. It saddens me and angers me that I spent so much of my valuable time to help people on EE for FREE while the site owner got paid big bucks and then turns around and screws me over. But eh I met a lot of brilliant experts at EE most of which are now on ERT so not all was a loss.

Thanks all,

I guess there has been some pretty questionable acts that have occured, and I guess I am lucky that to date, i havent had any issues with EE.
I like this Forum however, and i like the ideas and what it stands for, I would be happy to be a participant and add what I can. When i come accross something that i think i can work with I will start the articaly process and see how it goes

Looking forward to reading your stuff.

I feel it is only fair to warn you though. Writing articles on ERT is like smoking cigarettes.
The first one is kind of rough to get through, but it quickly becomes addictive.  ; )

O good good....in the middle of kicking the smokes at the moment so itll be one addiction to the next....joy!

>> in the middle of kicking the smokes...

Good Luck. Really.

I've been "in the middle" for about 30 years now.  : /

ha! yeah its a biatch of a thing thats for sure

My belated take on "EE v/s ERT"..

I wasn't anybody significant on EE, unlike Cd& and others, however I was active from time to time, contributed as much as I could. Still would, if it wasn't for the f'ing SPAM!

Now, I'm not against ads and monetizing websites. But just see the amount of SPAM on EE! It is a shame that such a good website like EE has been ruined.

For business, for profit? No. EE would be better served long term if it didn't spam 80% of its visitors away!

Now that I think about it, there is nothing great about EE itself. The members on EE are gold, but EE is nothing without its members. It is, after all, a web community and for a community that is not a way to treat your members.

I stumbled across and reached ERT myself (and of course EEE which had a early start) not before making my own 'bettered' version of EE ;) Won't spam the link here of course, let me know if you want to see it. :)

Post the link. Tthere are no EE police here to spank you for it.

I'm guessing you already know this (http://programmerassist.com) one Cd& .. ;)

Looks interesting.
I will check it out better when I get a few minutes.

: )

I'm surprised you've not seen it before. :-\

Sri,

Wouldn't it better to have your URL's like:

http://programmerassist.com/topic/11-web-development/
http://programmerassist.com/topic/33-programming/
...

instead of:

http://programmerassist.com/topic/11/
http://programmerassist.com/topic/33/

What do you think?  I'm not an expert in SEO but over the last 2 weeks i've learned alot and having keywords in URL don't do no harm. I'm impressed on how much its come along since i last visited...  Good work mate!

Yes that would look better, and thankfully, it wouldn't be too hard to implement. :)

>> I'm impressed on how much its come along since i last visited...
>> Good work mate!

Hardly ever worked on it. Development or otherwise! ;)

Just realized I can't change too many URL's. The programmerassist.com domain root has a Google PageRank of 5 and the topic area sub directory's have a PR of 4.

:o

Use 301 re-directs and the page ranks will migrate, as the spider work out the new structur. If you are not using a Google sitemap, you should do that as well.  The sitemap results in site changes getting picked up quickly.  If you have a Google webmasters account you get you can analyze the crawl stats and fix any errors that are causing mistakes by the spiders.

I don't think 301's should be really required. I just need to make some changes to the .htaccess and .../topic/11-programming can also work while ...../topic/11 continues to work.

It does look very familiar.
Apparently my "Brain-cell Loss Rate" is increasing.   : (

:D

Rod, aren't you still listed as editor in the web development area of EE.COM ?

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/

Yep...But you see a rather small number of posts there from me.  I made 500,000 in Web Dev in three months, then the big turmoil, and I've kept my business over here mainly.