Is experts-exchange.com Safe?

I have been a member of Experts Exchange for several years. The information provided by other members has been VERY helpful to me, both with personal computer issues as well as problems that I have encountered at clients.. There are two ways to be a member: provide accepted responses to other members and get points. Those points are exchanged for free membership and accolades from other members. The other way is to do what I do: as I am too busy to answer questions in my areas of expertise, I pay a nominal annual fee and get access to the site. That money has been very well spent as far as I am concerned! John

Requires the user to pay to view the solution. Usually provides bad information. Proven to use a bot to provide fake information and to trick search engines. This site has been marked by (21) blacklists saying this site is: "Scam(19); False Information(16); Distributes Malware(7); Untrustworthy(9); Phishing(12)". This site has been proven to spam your email. This site has been proven to contain malicious advertizement systems. This site requires the user to enter billing information to use a thirty day trial to view the information provided. Why this happens: They bill you after the 30 days, never telling you this. This site has been proven to create bot accounts on WOT to make this site look good. This sites bad rating started only 1 year after the sites first start, and continued to go down until the site had high traffic going to mywot.com, forcing the votes to stay up. The rating would be red if it wasn't for the bots. Stay away. Vote this site bad.

The only thing "questionable" about this site is that it is a for-pay Q&A site. Only paying customers and participating Experts can see posts that are marked "solved." It is certainly safe, and certainly legit. With that being said, it is easy to get access to those solutions by answering questions from the site. When 2-4 of your answers get accepted as the solution, you get free access to other answers for a month. Every month you have to earn your free membership again by answering questions. If you've ever Googled a problem and found a link to experts-exchange.com in the results that you wish you could see, then contribute to the community by answering questions and you'll get free access. Sure, some of the answers can be found in other Google results. But some of them can't. Sometimes users ask simple questions, which get answered by experts on EE. Having those simple answers is not the fault of EE, just like getting millions of hits from Google for a common phrase isn't Google's fault. Oh, and one more thing. If you don't like links to EE cluttering up your search results, install the GreaseMonkey add-on with the "Google Hit Hider" script. It lets you click a Block button that hides entire domains from your search results. Even though it has Google in the name, it works for many search engines, not just Google.

I used this site for a number of years while providing technical support. This site was INCREDIBLY valuable to me. Did I have to pay? Yes. But, it meant that I got quick answers from professionals around the world. If you don't want to pay, don't sign up. There is nothing about this that is a "scam". Experts are trying to help you for free--THEY have to pay also! Additionally, compare the cost of this subscription to that of a one-time support call from pretty much anywhere.