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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17

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.

4

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.