Peter, I rarely contribute here on the PuF forum - but since we've met in person several times and I'm at least a reader of both forums and I find the euroga airport database an ambitious and valuable project, let me add some thoughts here.

First of all, I would like to urge everyone to not make this thread about comparing euroga and PuF forum moderation policies. They are very different and each have their pros and cons, but I find this is not the topic of this thread and I think it's a dangerous path to go down here and it would only the harm the much more productive discussion of the airport database and the way its data is handled.

As has been pointed out, there are already several - more or less failed - such airport database projects out there (and, from the perspective of German users, one very successful -> eddh.de). From what I understand, for a long time, an own euroga project was not happening because of this very thought: Already several such databases and none are really useful because of the non regularly maintained content etc and maybe some other flaws.

You now have the - maybe somewhat unique! - chance to build something that is really backed by a large community and that comes to live and that can serve the entire European pilot community. I understand a LOT of thought and consideration has gone into building the database in a manageable, secure, and accessible way with as little flaws as possible. That is great stuff and I think - before everything else - deserves a great deal of recognition and appreciation.

Now, the next thing that is needed is sustainable (!) community support. The German community is quite large - and is currently very focused on eddh.de - not only for German, but for European airfields, albeit in German language only. It is going to be somewhat difficult, but also somewhat rewarding, to convince large parts of that community to contribute to the euroga database. And you will not get people to contribute their stuff on multiple sites. People will need to make a choice. I'm a good example: I'm a fan of the euroga community, but as of today, if I want to find out about a specific airfield, my one-stop shop is eddh.de as I KNOW it has the content I'm looking for. I don't NEED any other site at the moment. But for the sake of a European project, I would be willing to switch over - but there needs to be a unique selling point.

Georg has made the point quite clear and I think it was a very valid point: If you suceed in positioning the euroga airport database as the "single source of truth" in Europe for airfield reviews and let others USE that data, that would be the key reason for people to consider posting to that "single source of truth" rather than to one of the many scattered, more or less proprietary databases that they are loyal to already.

This has two components: The first is to let other non-commercial sites such as eddh.de tap on the data, possibly even (maybe in a future version) with a translation feature. This would require a clear statement on terms of use and something like API access. I really don't see any reason why one wouldn't want to take this path if this project is to suceed. Cooperation is the SINGLE key to stand out - competiion and protectionism is not. And has never been on the open web community of the last decade.

The second component would be commercial users such as SkyDemon and others. If you could jump over your shadow and let those providers use the euroga data as well, it would be even more beneficial to the success of the project. It is wholly beside the point to keep pointing fingers at the others and saying "look, they don't open up their data?". NONE of them are on a position to build this single source of truth like the euroga community is - but letting them include the data into their services - even if they make money with it - benefits the entire community much more than fragmented databases ever could. As you don't have commercial interests with this, you should not be afraid of this. Then again, it could even be debated if commercial users should pay a usage fee that contributes back into the euroga community for other projects - even that is thinkable. But if you're uncomfortable with commercial use, how about just starting with the first component and let non-commercial external users access the data.

Good luck and hope this moves in the right direction!

Best regards

Patrick