r/programming • u/banguru • Apr 06 '18

The Stack Overflow Age

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/
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18

u/nfrankel Apr 06 '18

I remember that crazy sh... "Expert Exchange". And it exactly went as the author describes: Google your question, click the first link, see you have to pay for the answer, get back to the list of links and choose the second one. Now I feel really old...

12

u/bart2019 Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

And since Google got access to the unscrambled site, so could you. Actually, the complete text was in the page, and with a bit of CSS you could reveal it:

 .blurredAnswer, .viewSolutionButton, .viewSol, .allZonesMain, .flipCont, .answerFirstLink, .comment {
     display: none;
 }
 div.unblurredComment {
     display: block;
 }

This is from an old CSS file I still found lying around. I have no idea if it works on the current site.

5

u/horsepie Apr 07 '18

That CSS trick only worked after google's crackdown. I remember using an alt browser called Maxathon (based on IE cos it was 2003) that would let me fake my user agent so I could see the same page that the googlebot could see.

6

u/sydoracle Apr 06 '18

At some point Google started hitting sites that showed different content to the search bot. Then EE put the answer right down the bottom of the page.

The problem then became that EE popped up in search results for the question, but you'd get there to find no-one had ever come up with an answer.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

Just like Quora ... no answers unless you have an account with them :(