Experts Exchange Update, November 12, 2002

--How Active is EE?
--A Word About Oracle
--New Expert Rewards Programs
--Propose Answer Functionality Has Been Removed
--Passing Through the Fire


-How Active is EE?

Last month, the EE site and community hosted 55,000 active members and experts. Thats quite a large family! Congratulations and thanks to all the returning members who made such growth possible, and a warm welcome to all the new members.

-A Word About Oracle

As many have noticed, Oracle has been advertising on our site and has been generous in their support of the site and community at this critical juncture. Please consider the following message from our sponsor, as they have kindly considered EE and its community:
Oracle provides comprehensive business intelligence at up to 80% less cost than other vendors. Oracles offering includes ad hoc query, enterprise reporting, real-time recommendations, and clickstream analysis. Plus, you get an ETL tool for consolidating all of your data into a single source. Get it all from the business intelligence vendor ranked #1 by DM Review. Click here to view a FREE demo and see how much you could save with Oracle's business intelligence.

-New Expert Reward Programs

We all extend a warm welcome to the many new and talented experts on the site. To accommodate these new experts, we have several recognition programs on the way that will allow them to receive the recognition they deserve in their various fields, without having to compete directly against expert scores accumulated since EEs launch.
We will be implementing expert seasons of 3-12 months duration for the Top 15 and the Top 100 site-wide listings. These rankings will reflect scores for recent activity and give new experts a level playing field with older experts. Be assured, however, that we will retain all-time scores to recognize the achievements of long standing experts.
Secondly, were working hard to institute a new t-shirt rewards program. This will allow experts who achieve certain milestone scores to receive exclusive EE expert t-shirts. Each milestone will be a reflection of their increasing contributions, skill, and rank as an expert. At the present time, we are looking for sponsors for this program, setting the milestone scores, and coming up with designs for the t-shirts. If you have any suggestions, please email me at ken@experts-exchange.com

-Propose Answer Functionality Has Been Removed

Due to numerous long-standing requests, complaints, and controversies over its use, weve removed the ability to lock a question with an answer. This will be a temporary solution until staff, moderators, the Expert Advisory, and the community at large can come up with a new system for experts to propose solutions and/or enter into more exclusive dialogues with questioners.

-Passing Through the Fire

EE has passed through several fires caused by sudden and heavy traffic starting in mid-September. Along the way engineering had to make many profound changes to the sites architecture. Now that the site is providing a stable and quick workplace for the members, engineering can refocus on cleaning up some legacy code and implementing new features. Along with the features already mentioned above, there will be many improvements to the sites functionality in a couple months.
Keep your eyes open for updates on our progress and discussions of the new features we would like to implement.

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