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.