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Comment by kpanghmc | Hacker News Reader

One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer. Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question.

StackOverflow allows for both community voting AND for the original asker to indicate which answer was the best answer. I suppose the only thing it doesn't do is require the asker to select a best answer like EE does apparently.

Also, how in the world did they get this process patented?

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I somehow manage to lose more faith in the patent system every day. I thought it was at zero, but somehow it's lower.

Perhaps I should patent my faith system that allows for negative numbers. Seems reasonable...

I store faiths in ints so they roll over to positive and I feel better for a while.

I have a patent on that. Pay up.

(had to get that out of my system. feel better now.)

Stored my bank balance in an int too. You'll have to wait for it to roll over.

how's this for a meta-ironic comment: when I read your first 2 sentences, I immediately thought of a joke that I was going to make along the lines of, "sorry I have a patent on systems allowing you to submit a negative amount of faith in something, pay up or shutup!"

Then I read your last 2 sentences. Too weird! Also goes to show, again, what a joke the patent system is. Multiple people can "independently" come up with the same "innovation", given reasonably similar skills and context.

That's what the `non-obvious' restriction should be good for.

You shouldn't loose faith because of yet another silly example of what can be patented. The main problem is that it can be defended in court to the extent where most people can't take on a wealthy patentholder, no matter how ridiculous the patent.

http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6064978

IANAL, but it appears that simply having a "question and answer" site doesn't apply to this patent. If you read the patent, it's mostly related to the idea of asking a question costs points and giving the best answer, as chosen by the asker, receives points.

Any variation on this scheme, such as a general moderator or the public via voting choses the best answer, or not having the asker assign points to a question to be received (avoid the economy, still have asker chose best answer) can avoid this patent.

Merely removing one claim would be sufficient to avoid their patent. It gets tricky if you "change" a claim, because then you have to consider the substantiality of that change. For example, moving the "point escrow" of claim 9 would be sufficient to avoid their entire patent, but you'd likely be staring down the barrel of the dirtbag attorney they hire to drag you through the mud in an expensive federal court case, hoping you'll just opt for a licensing agreement. It is what it is.

It seems like 90% of the EE questions I see, the asker has vanished before accepting one of the answers - in those cases this patented system is effectively worthless since I have no idea which answer is best. At least on SO I can still get an idea if some answers are better (or if some are flat-out wrong, as happens).

When the asker disappears (which happens even more at SO) a cleanup crew will come and either accept an answer (but give the experts chance to discuss which) or delete it. At SO it just sits there, with whatever votes and no accept. When the opposite happens, you need to do a bounty at SO which may or may not work (never worked for me). At EE the question is first marked abandoned, attracting experts who subscribe to that zone - if no reaction, a moderator will send out requests to know experts in the zone and re-zone if needed. Works well

> when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question.

Additionally, I find this point to hardly be the case. I love that on SO you can look below the answer to see another one with ten times as many votes and I know that's the better answer.

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