SEMblog

If you have used Google to look for IT solutions you will be unable to avoid Experts Exchange. However many IT professionals avoid their answers because they are in the mistaken belief that they need to pay for access.

As a previous user of Experts Exchange, including expert of the year for three years in a row, I never paid them a penny, even before I started clocking up the large number of points.

However, Experts Exchange do not help themselves or their reputation in the IT community by hiding the free signup page away. I know this has been raised with the management team of EE in the past, but they seem to ignore it.
If you follow the public sign up links you will not see the free link - all it is pushing you to is the paid options. Even the free trial requires a credit card to sign up.

In some ways you can understand why, EE is a business and they want the subscriptions which pay for the servers, developers etc.

So how do you get free access?

At the time of writing if you choose "Think you're an expert" in the lower right corner, you can then choose another link to get to the free signup - which requires a username and email address.

However to make things easier here is the link to the free sign up page:
http://semb.ee

Sign up, save the password and then you don't have to worry about it again.

If you want the advert free site (I actually forgot what it looked like with the ads) then you need to get 10,000 points. That is five, 500 point questions. (EE has a point multiplier which means a question which costs 500 points earns 2000 to the expert who answers it) and then you need 3000 a month to maintain the premium access.

There is an awful lot of information in the site, I contributed in excess of 10,000 answers personally. It would be a shame to not get access to them just because of the way that Experts Exchange decides to sell themselves, when there is a free option available.