FAQ on the new site

There are a number of issues related to the new site at Experts Exchange that are not yet incorporated into the help page. This is intended to be a temporary FAQ on some of the issues. For all questions related to Experts Exchange, the Help Page at Experts Exchange is the official version.

• Preliminary notes
• The Skins - what's the difference?
• Question Wizard - how it works and what it does
• The Experts tab, part I - Filters
• The Experts tab, part II - My Questions
• The Experts tab, part III - The Rest
• Points - how do they work?
• What else is new?

Preliminary Notes

As you have probably noticed, the new site is more or less the default site, and it will become the only site in the next few days. However, it is not a completed project. Over the coming months, features that have been requested by members will be incorporated; new topic areas will also be added to the mix. As such, the absence of a functionality should not be taken to mean it will never be there -- only that it isn't there at the moment.

What is also true is that there are still bugs and imperfections. Again, these will be dealt with as quickly as possible. If you have concerns, comments or complaints, please send them to feedback@experts-exchange.com. EE is paying attention to your comments, and uses your emails to create and maintain a priority list of requests.

The Skins

We have provided this section only because it is important to know how big the difference is. Our own tests indicate that the Expert skin reduces the amount of information sent from EE's servers to you by around 80 per cent; the Expert skin actually uses less bandwidth than does the site with which we are all familiar.

Nonetheless, there are still issues with the Expert skin, which is why there is a disclaimer in place. EE is addressing those issues as quickly as possible.

Question Wizard

The analysis done by the Wizard uses two sources of information to make its recommendations. The first -- which is in place for most of the topic areas on the site -- is sets of keywords developed by the Page Editors and Moderators. At the time the keywords were developed, the PEs and Mods had no real knowledge of exactly how the Wizard worked, so in some cases, the keywords could have been chosen better; EE has reviewed the keywords for all of the topic areas and has made some changes where appropriate.

The other source -- and the one that will become dominant over time -- is the topic area itself. As more questions are asked, the Wizard will use an algorith to match the question to other, similar questions, and will suggests topic areas based on its own findings. It will, in essence, create its own keywords.

The Wizard allows the member to cross-post his question in up to three topic areas, but it does not require that it be cross-posted. The Page Editors and Moderators have the authority and the tools to move a question to the correct topic area; to remove a question from an inappropriate topic area; and to add to the list of topic areas in which a question is posted. One of their considerations will be the impact on the members who are participating; as an example, if a question that is obviously about Visual Basic that has nothing to do with VB.NET is cross-posted, they may remove VB.NET from the posting. However, if a VB.NET Expert has responded with information that moves toward a solution, the question will remain in both. For more on the implications of cross-posting, please see the section on Points below.

The Experts tab, part I - Filters

The second most obvious change to Experts Exchange is the Experts tab. It has two components: Filters and My Questions; this section deals with the Filters.

In the past, EE's programming has required that Experts navigate to topic areas in order to find questions they are interested in helping solve. That is no longer the case.

On the Experts tab, you will see four buttons or tabs, depending on which skin you're using. The tabs say, from left to right, Question Filter, Create Filter, Zone Rank, and Member Rank. (We will discuss the latter two in the Points section.). Once you have created your filters, you will no longer need to navigate to a topic area.

To create a filter, click the button/tab. At the left, you will see a list of criteria - Terms, Query, Date, Zone, Points, Type and Display. Here's what each one does:

• Terms: This is for keywords, like any other search.
• Query: This functionality is not yet implemented.
• Date: This allows you to restrict the date range. If you only want to see questions asked today, you would use this to do so. We suggest using the Three Days as a minimum.
• Zone: This is where you would restrict your search to specific topic areas. However, you can also use the keywords to do the same thing (to a certain extent). For example, there are always questions about moving data from Excel to Access or some other Office application that might not be asked in the Excel TA. By using the Terms filter, you would find those, where you might not if you used the Zone filter.
• Points: If you're not interested in any question worth 50 points or less, this is where you restrict your filter so you don't see those.
• Type: Three choices - Any, Solution, or In Progress. That means Any, Open or Closed.
• Display: The filter can be told to show a list of up to 100 results per page.

There is no restriction on the number of filters you can have, and you can move them up and down the list, and remove them entirely if you choose. You run the filter simply by clicking a link.

The Experts tab, part II - My Questions

The second box on the Experts tab has three parts: My Participated Questions, My Monitored Questions and My Questions. In reverse order:

• My Questions: This is your open questions, no matter what topic area. Yes, you can sort them.
• My Monitored Questions: This is the list of questions in which you have not commented but are subscribed to. If you comment in the question, it moves off of this list and onto the My Participated Questions list.
• My Participated Questions: This is the list of questions in which you have commented. All of the open questions in which you are a participant are listed.

Questions that are closed are kept on the Participated and Monitored lists for about four weeks.

The Experts tab, part III - The Rest

This section deals with the other aspects of the Experts tab. Some of it is familiar, and won't be discussed in detail, but other parts are new.

• Zone Rank: This shows your point total and current certificates in the various topic areas on the site. At the moment, it does not show your ranking within each of the topic areas, but that functionality has been requested, and will show up eventually. You can show all of your topic areas, or can have them shown broken down by the 18 zones listed across the top of every page.
• Member Rank: This shows your overall point total and your rank compared to other Experts. It can also be shown broken down by the 18 zones.
• Overall and yearly rankings: We are aware that the numbers posted in these boxes are not accurate; the ones posted in your profile are. If you have any question regarding the totals shown for you, ask a Moderator or Administrator to manually recalculate your totals.

Points - how do they work?

In a nutshell, they work the same way they always have, as described in the help page, but with a bit of a twist. If a question is cross-posted, the Experts who are credited with the solution will receive points in all of the TAs the question was asked in. That means that a question asked in both MS Access and ASP will have points awarded in both, regardless of what path the Experts took to arrive at the question.

However, the points are added to the Expert's overall total only once. So, if a 100-point question, asked in both Access and ASP, gets an A grade, the Expert would receive 400 points on each of his totals in Access and ASP, but would only receive 400 points on his overall total.

What else is new?

The All Topics Page: This page will take some time to load for almost everyone. The reason is that it has a ton of javascript. There are now over 900 topic areas (the old site had 250), and if you want to browse to any of them, you can do so for almost all of them through at least two different paths; for the Windows XP topic area, there are six different paths you can take. That's a lot of information. It also loads when you select the topic area tab while creating a filter or doing an advanced search.

However, the topic area page also has a "Find Zone Areas" feature; if you type in Windows XP, it will return a link to the topic area.

Cross-posting: When an Asker uses the Question Wizard, he is presented with suggested topic areas; he can choose up to three. This means that pointer questions are no longer necessary. However, the URL to the question may not be what you expect when you post a comment. If the first topic area selected is Access, followed by ASP and HTML, and your filter looks for questions in HTML, you will receive a notification based on the filter. When you post your comment, the URL will show the path to Access. Please do not panic; you are still in the right place.

Proposed Answer: At this point, the Proposed Answer has no functionality. In the future, it will, but exactly what that functionality is, and how it will impact both Askers and Experts, has not been determined. We just know it will do something.

Return to Expert page.