Apologies for my late response to this. I have to say, I’m a bit at a loss of words. Let me try to answer in two segments:
To address Peter’s concerns: I’m not sure I can find better words than the ones already tried above and @lionel has tried to drive the same points. On the one hand, you are saying yourself (earlier on this thread):
“t’s like the old joke about four pilots on a desert island; a year later they have created four user groups, four forums, and each forum has 20 members When building a GA community one has to rise above this, and it is particularly challenging when doing it internationally. EuroGA has done it successfully.”
Yes – you have to rise above it. I’m desperate for a European airport review community to rise above the fragmented silos. And yet, you seem to block off any idea, any path forward to DO that, to RISE above it. The only way to rise above the silos is to NOT be a silo.
You’re questioning that by providing a read-only JSON output next to the HTML output (and therefore allowing the data to have a greater reach) would provide any value. I’m saying that it is DEFINITELY going to increase the number of contributions as well as readers of the database. If it is going to be a lot, or just a few, I don’t know. What I do know is that I’d sit down a day or two and type in my reviews for the last 100 visited airfields or so, if I felt there was a vision behind this. I will not put that time into typing that stuff in there if the “vision” is to remain a silo maintained by an exclusive club of gentlemen who fear their advice might actually benefit the community. I might have done it 10 years ago, but not in 2021.
Also, I offered to add this feature for free – it would come at no cost, bringing either zero benefit (as you seem to think) or some benefit. It would definitely benefit people like @lionel or me who are passionate to build cool things on top of what you have build (that’s the philosophy of this whole “internet” thing, after all, no?). I still sense some people here find the thought of people building upon other people’s things offensive, rather than seeing that the outcome is more than the sum of parts.
You mention that you consider building a Telegram interface. That essentially is an API then as well. So why not spend that time on a generic API that can then be used to build a Telegram bot, or an Alexa bot, or what not?
As it is so easy to build a bot including natural language processing on top of structured data, I’m adding to my offer to build the json output and the 100 or so airport reviews a Telegram bot that will handle natural language requests in multiple European languages as well as old-school “/commands” for those who prefer that.
But having said all that, the really most disillusioning responses were those by @Emir and @172driver. Those comments by users/contributors to the project really just make me sad. If that is the spirit here, I might just have to accept that and wish you well, but take my hat and go (with respect to the airport database, has nothing to do with the forum community of course). For what it’s worth, if that was the spirit of Wikipedia, there would be no Wikipedia today. A lot of good things on the internet wouldn’t exist if everyone shared this kind of thinking.
I really, really don’t understand your sentiments. If you take the time to contribute, wouldn’t you be the happier the more people can benefit from your contribution?
But if for some reason that is just beyond me, you really, really can’t live with folks reading your airport review in ANY other format than the Euroga web interface, then it could still be possible to move forward with this and including a user account flag that either allows or disallows that user’s reports from being accessed via the API. That would be a simple and clean solution and everyone be happy?
@Patrick here you go:
https://github.com/dimme/euroga-airports-to-json
Example: https://airports2json.cryo.dev/
Consider submitting a pull request if you improve the code, e.g. replacing ugly regex with a proper DOM parser.
@Patrick, I feel the same about this as you do.
But if for some reason that is just beyond me, you really, really can’t live with folks reading your airport review in ANY other format than the Euroga web interface
What I don’t get is the emotive and pushy way this is being put.
As I wrote before, we have been contacted by other people wanting open access to the data, all of them having been rebuffed by those running the various other (mostly German) databases. When I pointed this “slight irony” out somewhere I got beaten up and accused of whataboutism – a word I had to google on 
So… they come to EuroGA, presumably because
The issue which everybody is skirting around is that an open API (as opposed to scraping of the website, which as Dimme shows above is quite feasible) would imply the content being lifted and republished on any other website, and of course most of them will be commercial.
If 1/10 of the keyboard time spent so far was put into thinking up a design for a telegram query, I would have somebody working on that by now! Mentioned previously e.g. here.
Peter wrote:
The issue which everybody is skirting around is that an open API (as opposed to scraping of the website, which as Dimme shows above is quite feasible) would imply the content being lifted and republished on any other website, and of course most of them will be commercial.
A reading-only API is essentially the same as I implemented above, just more efficient on the server because now multiple queries have to be done to fetch all the search page pages.
I can see the advantage of the data being easily presented in different ways. I have to admit I would personally be more likely to use an app than the website, and I would prefer a dedicated app to a telegram bot.
I don’t know enough about the ins and outs, so I won’t waste too much space, but is it not possible to create an API with terms and conditions restricting it to non commercial use only, and that the credit must be given to the contributor for any data presented?
But having said all that, the really most disillusioning responses were those by @Emir and @172driver. Those comments by users/contributors to the project really just make me sad. If that is the spirit here, I might just have to accept that and wish you well, but take my hat and go (with respect to the airport database, has nothing to do with the forum community of course).
As I wrote before, I like to contribute to “my” community and want “my” community to have benefits of it if possible. Your reasons my be different and I don’t see why the option of one (or two) forum members would make you refrain from contributing. Stating the above you sound pretty emotional “if it’s not going to be under my conditions, I won’t participate”. However, “your” conditions unfortunately turned up after the conditions database was originally set “by forum members for forum members”. I regret if someone who contribute to the forum under same conditions can’t accept these conditions for database contribution.
For what it’s worth, if that was the spirit of Wikipedia, there would be no Wikipedia today.
FWIW for some countries (like Croatia) it would be better if there wasn’t local Wikipedia because it’s taken over by group of local nazis (I don’t exaggerate and it’s not about turning up word “fascism” sooner or later in any discussion) and history revisionists. A living proof of good ideas turning horribly bad.
Emir wrote:
the conditions database was originally set “by forum members for forum members”.
Wow. I very seriously misunderstood them then. I thought the goal was “for European GA”, not restricted to “forum members”. Darn, isn’t that why we have, not only anonymous query, but also anonymous submissions, without forum account?
lionel wrote:
I thought the goal was “for European GA”
Yeah. It was created for the greater good, for peace in the world and for contribution in fight against tropical deseases.
Of course it was created primarily for the forum members. Anonymous submitting was added later on request, I’m not sure about anonymous query – maybe it was there from the very beginning. But in my opinion, the purpose of anonymous submitting is more to enable forum members, concerned about privacy, to submit the report anonymously rather than to enable random person who has no relation with EuroGA to report airport experience.
The airports database was set up as a part of the “EuroGA project”.
That should be obvious to all.
That project, in turn, was set up to promote European GA, etc.
An absolutely huge amount of time and effort, and lately quite a bit of money, has gone into EuroGA. Obviously we are not going to funnel the data to all the various (mostly commercial) sites etc and obviously this is why nobody else is interested either, as discussed above.
The database was always readable by anyone. We even made the “visited airports” plotting function available to all, despite the potential for abuse.
The write access is currently limited to those with a EuroGA account which is approved for posting. This is year 2021, not 2001, and any open site will be trashed within days if not hours. The database server gets attacked several times per second… So some form of authentication will always be needed for write access, and this is true for a telegram interface too; see above.
I would be amazed if anyone wanted to write an app. It is a lot of work to do a good job. One needs a lot of experience to achieve a high level of compatibility. Even well funded outfits (e.g. phone companies, banks, etc) produce crap. One is also chasing a moving target all the time, new phones, new versions of android, ios, osx, you name it. Very few apps are done well, and quite a few are only just hanging in there. What tends to happen is that the programmer goes for ios (because that’s what “everybody goes for”) and android versions get left far behind. And he will either get a steady stream of complaints about it not working on new device x, or will do what practically everybody does and ignore the complaints and then we (i.e. me) end up with a lot of hassle. I would confidently predict that if we spent a fair bit of time and money doing an API suitable for an app, there would be a flurry of activity until the guy writing it gets himself a new girlfriend.
Nowadays any solution like this has to work in a browser. That is not without problems but at least one needs to deal mainly with different browsers and device sizes. The current web interface should work on almost everything in current use; if it does not then nobody has reported it Nobody has suggested a better or different layout, and I did a lot of consultation to get the current one originally.
Let’s wait for the CV19 business to die down and get lots of people flying again, and everybody is going to feel better The best thing people can do is contribute reports on places they have been to.
