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  #21  
Old Posted Sep 16, 2022, 12:24 PM
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The writing on the wall came when Emporis started putting everything behind paywalls. Like the casual skyscraper enthusiast is going to pay for that information. Especially when free, better alternatives exist (here's lookin' at you, SSP).

I had a skyscrapers.com account, and I used to post stuff way back in the day. Damn that seems like a lifetime ago: I was in my Master's program, living in a shitty apartment in another city, drinking beer like I was on shore leave, Quebecoise girlfriend, no kids, no worries....
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  #22  
Old Posted Sep 17, 2022, 4:41 AM
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Well its a wrap. This site shut down faster than a Chinese city with 1 Covid case.


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  #23  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 7:59 AM
evcco evcco is offline
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Haha. Wow.

I was a photographer, editor, and "senior editor" at Skyscrapers/Emporis for over 20 years and just found out about this now.

Ditto what everyone else has said about the post-Emporis downturn. I hadn't been too active myself the past 5-10 years; but I did add a few photos just a week or so ago.

I take it I wont be getting any more residuals for my pics (does anyone know if CoStar is, or will still be selling them?) I do have a box of vintage Skyscrapers.com business cards though. Perhaps they'll be worth something now. Lol.
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  #24  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 1:06 PM
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This was really a chock! Have been useing Emporis since it started at Skyscrapers.com. I often go to Emporis to check for new buildings that haven't been yet in the SSP diagrams.
Found out it right now when I entered Emporis to search for some proposed buildings in Gothenburg. Guess Ctbuh is the best source to go, for data that is not on SSP yet. But it is locked if you want to see more the the 6 tallest. On Emporis you could see all completed, but not sort proposed etc.
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  #25  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 4:04 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
CoStar will probably package Emporis with their other crappy products and charge you like 2k a year to view their bad data.

Anyone who has submitted info to Emporis is making Andy Florence (who grew up in ridiculous wealth) even wealthier.
That would be me since I submitted a lot of info about high rises & skyscrapers missing from the Miami page. I remember submitting things to a editor who lived in Palestine and he had to verify everything before updating.
The introduction for the Miami page was written by me as well.
Damn no money but not even a credit?

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  #26  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 5:29 PM
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chris08876 chris08876 is offline
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Hopefully this collapse will bring some of those folks here to aid SSP databases. I've noticed ever since the new Psilocybin mushroom look of Skyscrapercity and confusing layout only endorsed by the American Stroke Association, there's been an uptick of contributions for the various forum sections. More talent and contributors here, the better!

Overall I think SSP has been poppin' lately as they say on the streets. At least within the last 4-5 months, it just seems so.
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  #27  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 5:37 PM
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SSC was purchased by some Toronto based company that owns a bunch of forums and promptly completely screwed up the layout of the forums making them very challenging to navigate to a point where new users will mostly be turned away.
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  #28  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 5:49 PM
mhays mhays is online now
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I only go to SSC for my local forum. It's too annoying for the rest. SSP's own reorg caused us to go there a long time ago...trying to make Seattle look like the current Portland nightmare of subfolders. It was even worse in the days of slow internet.
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  #29  
Old Posted Sep 19, 2022, 9:45 PM
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I kept reading about Emporis/Skyscrapers.com trying to take advantage of contributors and make a profit, so I started avoiding them. Apparently, they only managed like one subscriber or something.

SSC, the other site where it all started for me, the reason I bought my very first camera ever, but now owned by VerticalScope whose overreaching terms of use makes me unable to post my photographs there now. VerticalScope recently purchased another photography website I frequent too and the forum started dying after that.

Another site I used to visit was UrbanToronto, but even after taking so much time to post photothreads there to criticize sprawl like "Mississauga's Heartland (Town Centre)" with little or no response, the other forumers finally got angry and accused me of "incessant boosterism" after I disagreed with the notion that the transit of Toronto suburb, Brampton, "runs circles" around transit of Toronto suburb, Mississauga, and I dared to put Mississauga's transit system near the same level as Brampton's. But what should I expect when one of the admins is from Brampton, right? UrbanToronto can go jump off the Bloor Viaduct as far as I'm concerned. Even with a userbase mostly from outside of Toronto, SSP was the only place that ever appreciated my contributions and I thank you all for that. My recent "Ninth Line" photos got 17 responses here, no doubt would have been 0 over there.
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  #30  
Old Posted Sep 20, 2022, 12:43 PM
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^I love your photo threads. One day soon, during lunch, I am going to go through the ones I haven't seen.
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  #31  
Old Posted Sep 20, 2022, 2:08 PM
Scraperbase.com Scraperbase.com is offline
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Hi, I just found this thread and signed up to Skyscraperpage to give my thoughts. I also was a Skyscrapers.com and then Emporis editor since 2002. So for twenty years. I know several people who joined about the same time. Over the years many friendships were formed we all became "senior editors" which allowed us to edit any building. At that time regular editors had to request edit rights for each city individually to prevent vandalism. When we got the chance to edit everything, some people added and edited tons of buildings and invested hundreds of hours or more over the years. I remember that there was one guy who sat in a public library most of the day adding buildings.

The community broke when the founders of Emporis sold it to a company in Hamburg who was not interested in skyscrapers at all. Some former Emporis editors built Phorio after that. The site was based on data that was "saved" before Emporis was sold. Most of the old Emporis editors stopped adding data to Emporis, but some new editors joined and again added a lot of data. Some of them were not even born when the "old" crew joined Skyscrapers.com. Those new folks still believed that adding data to Emporis will create knowledge for the world that will survive. Those people now also had to learn the harsh reality when Emporis went offline. All their work is no hidden from the internet and was monetized by the greedy new owners of Emporis, who secretly had bought the company in 2020 without informing any of the editors.

About ten frustrated former Emporis editors have now met in a Telegram group about the topic. Feel free to join us there: https://t.me/+g_e8h0IxOZ83MDZl There is not much happening at the group at the moment though, but maybe it is a good place to discuss what happens next.

Emporis also owed many of us money for sold photos. In my cases it was just €47.50, but for some others it was hundreds of Euros. When we heard that the site would be taken offline, we hit the "Request Payout" button to initiate a payment via PayPal and the next days or weeks will show if we will really get our money. Sadly I doubt it.

There are some discussions now if we should somehow create an open building database under the roof of the Wikimedia foundation. There it would survive for decades or centuries and can not be sold or hidden. That is not as easy as one could think though. An alternative is that every one of us who has some cosing knowledge creates their own skyscraper website and we all the the data among those websites. I already own one, but it is still not complete and will only cover all complete skyscrapers over 500 feet. That already is a lot of work. I would love to see tons of websites which do the same, even if they copy my data.

I also have given up the idea that I can earn a lot of money from photos of skyscrapers. During the last 15 years or so, I earned a few thousand dollars for my photos at Alamy, but commissions there got smaller and smaller until they reached a point that made me quit Alamy. I still understand that some of you like earning some money for their photos, but I wonder if the best place for our photos would be Wikimedia, where they also would survive for a long time. So far I did not make the step of donating large parts of my portfolio to Wikimedia, but I will probably do that sooner or later, because I still dream of an internet where everybody creates some content for free and can in return use the free content created by others. I will never again watermark my photos jut because I could sell them for a few dollars. The same is true for all skyscraper data I have in my "possession".

Imagine we could work together and make so much data public, that all the hidden data purchased by those greedy companies gets pretty much worthless. That is the best way to fight back.
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  #32  
Old Posted Sep 20, 2022, 2:19 PM
mrnyc mrnyc is offline
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^ i freakin hate wiki, it has been co-opted, but you are right it's probably the best platform to do something like emporis and it is an innocent enough topic that not too much byzantine wiki politics would be involved.
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  #33  
Old Posted Sep 20, 2022, 5:04 PM
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The data is just massive. I think its unavoidable the best intentions will eventually turn to monopolizing it. Emporis suggests paywalls and licensing doesn't pay the bills.
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  #34  
Old Posted Oct 3, 2022, 6:31 AM
odurandina odurandina is offline
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absolutely horrible the Emporis site is gone
wiki is awful
Can't change Exchange Place in Boston from its incorrectly listed height (510')
to its correct/actual/ factual FAA/FCC (+discernable) height of 539'.
Wait: you can't fix it here neither without going to war.
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  #35  
Old Posted Oct 10, 2022, 9:51 PM
Scraperbase.com Scraperbase.com is offline
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I noticed that the guy, who is responsible for the Emporis situation, now seems to build another skyscraper database. Not sure if we should trust him again.

The funny thing is that he created a "hall of fame" on that website and put HIMSELF into that hall of fame just above Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia:

https://www.skydb.net/hall-of-fame
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  #36  
Old Posted Oct 10, 2022, 11:31 PM
wwmiv wwmiv is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Scraperbase.com View Post
I noticed that the guy, who is responsible for the Emporis situation, now seems to build another skyscraper database. Not sure if we should trust him again.

The funny thing is that he created a "hall of fame" on that website and put HIMSELF into that hall of fame just above Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia:

https://www.skydb.net/hall-of-fame
Oh snap. Won’t he end up in court for this?
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HTOWN: 2305k (+10%) + MSA suburbs: 4818k (+26%) + CSA exurbs: 190k (+6%)
BIGD: 1304k (+9%) + MSA div. suburbs: 3826k (+26%) + adj. CSA exurbs: 394k (+8%)
FTW: 919k (+24%) + MSA div. suburbs: 1589k (+14%) + adj. CSA exurbs: 90k (+12%)
SATX: 1435k (+8%) + MSA suburbs: 1124k (+38%) + CSA exurbs: 18k (+11%)
ATX: 962k (+22%) + MSA suburbs: 1322k (+43%)
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  #37  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2022, 1:44 AM
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Klippenstein Klippenstein is offline
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It's pretty glitchy, but I found this on the about us page.

Quote:
SKYDB is a joint project supported by Phorio, SkyscraperPage, OSM Buildings, and other platforms.
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  #38  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2022, 2:51 AM
wwmiv wwmiv is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Klippenstein View Post
It's pretty glitchy, but I found this on the about us page.
Ahhhhh. As long as the data sources are distinct, I suppose he’s fine.
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HTOWN: 2305k (+10%) + MSA suburbs: 4818k (+26%) + CSA exurbs: 190k (+6%)
BIGD: 1304k (+9%) + MSA div. suburbs: 3826k (+26%) + adj. CSA exurbs: 394k (+8%)
FTW: 919k (+24%) + MSA div. suburbs: 1589k (+14%) + adj. CSA exurbs: 90k (+12%)
SATX: 1435k (+8%) + MSA suburbs: 1124k (+38%) + CSA exurbs: 18k (+11%)
ATX: 962k (+22%) + MSA suburbs: 1322k (+43%)
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  #39  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2022, 7:17 AM
Scraperbase.com Scraperbase.com is offline
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Not sure how far SkyscraperPage really is involved. I still remember how Emporis many years ago copied all the diagrams of SkyscraperPage without any permission. Michael told us that Dylan had agreed to share those diagrams, but apparently that was not the case, because Dylan was quite furious and insisted that the diagrams would be deleted from Emporis. Not sure if there was just a miscommunication or if Michael had the strategy to create facts first and get an agreement later.

One thing that is strange is that there is a blog on SkyDB with just one entry. That entry is from January 2021:

https://www.skydb.net/sky-db-skyscra...egend-is-back/

So the website already exists for over 20 months, but it still does not work. Not sure if it is a major issue or just a few minor errors in the code. The blog post says "There are a lot of things we will implement in the weeks and months to come", but apparently that did not age well.

The website https://www.phorio.com, which is made by the same people as SkyDB, is already offline since late last year. It seems strange to me that you would not fix the main website about ALL buildings before you start a side project about skyscrapers that relies on the data of the main website. If Phorio editors also did not have any access to the website since last year, it will already be quite outdated when it gets back online.

I am somehow proud that at the moment my own skyscraper database has longest list of skyscrapers over 500 feet with 6,211 entries, but I would love some "competition", because I do not want to do all the work on my own. I would prefer to be just one piece in a network of skyscraper websites who support each other. In the end we are there for promoting skyscrapers.

What happened to the idea that on the internet everybody shares his knowledge about the world for free with anyone who is interested? Skyscrapers are such a dominant thing in cities around the world, but at the moment there are more websites were people can rate each other's poo than websites about skyscrapers.

Yesterday I asked myself if China might have more buildings over 300 metres than Germany has buildings over 100 metres. That likely is the case, but right now it would be lot of work to find out. Just one month ago I could have found that with Emporis in a minute or so.

My last hope is that the CoStar/Emporis deal was against EU or US antitrust laws. Since when is it legal to buy your only competitor to get a monopoly? That is basically what happened with Emporis. CoStar now has the only comprehensive building database in the world and if someone needs that data, he has to buy it from CoStar. Does anyone know how to make the antitrust authorities aware of that problem? We should at least try that in as many countries as possible. If we are successful, the sale might be reversed and Emporis might come back online. It is at least worth a try.
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  #40  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2022, 1:23 PM
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WhipperSnapper WhipperSnapper is offline
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Your site really puts things in perspective. A skyscraper is still a big deal. Well done

It's a little garbled with feet than metres than feet again. International sites like SSC and SSP have redefined a skyscraper as 150 metres (Emporis an outlier at 100 metres) and a supertall as 300 metres since the days of the hot 500 foot list.

Having the name of the tallest building and max specs for the location in a popular format for posting specs for the specified building is confusing as well.
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