Thanks for the fantastic work of you and your team Peter. It's great to see how the community has come together to rescue the DPReview information and community.
This is the kind of project that would naturally fit hand-in-hand with a forum like here, so I hope you guys can coordinate a bit going forward. I mean, it would totally make sense for the new DPR to have Cameras and Lenses as two of the top level menu items.
I see that you plan reviews, but there are at least two ways of doing that: The old DPR had both professional and user reviews. I don't know your plans, but I think both make sense going forward, but maybe differently:
Professional reviews linking to respectable sources such as Imaging Resource and others. This could basically be added to the Open Product Data set along with ratings.
User reviews linking to forum posts. Again, the data hosted by digicamfinder may just be links and ratings pointing to actual content somewhere else like here, or it could be something more involved but with links to further discuss (and include quotes) in a forum setting.
Being able to use one username would be better for end users. I'm not sure how that is best preserved, maybe we need a third initiative, the Open Social Directory, that can be used as OIDC identity provider for loosely coupled web sites.
This is just great! Thanks so much for doing this, it would be amazing if there was a way to link these two sites, and I really like the idea of having user reviews linking to posts in the forum? It would be a great feature!
Good effort it getting the data and setting something up so quick.
I myself was building a camera and lens spec website aswell cameraspecs.co.uk , although I have been doing it a while longer and not trying to scrape the data. But I suppose now they closing that's not really an issue... its about trying to save what's there and move on with it.
There's one thing I miss from the old DPR version: The announcement text. I don't suggest you copy editorial content, but most cameras had a press release attached, and a press release is (like technical specifications) clearly not Amazon property.