Webb Site No More...

[shri]

I plan the following steps:

All manual data collection by my assistant on directors and supervisors of HK-listed companies and their advisers (bankers, lawyers, auditors, financial advisors etc) will cease, effective 31-Mar-2025.

The directors' pay database project will continue for financial year-ends up to 31-Dec-2024 (the Listing Rules deadline for publishing the annual reports is 30-Apr-2025). I ask the volunteers to focus on completing and verifying the dataset from 2005 to 2024. I will then make the full dataset available for download.

Automated data collection (for example, the CCASS Analysis System, SFC licensees, HK law firms) will continue until the first annual expiry date (31-Oct) for the Webb-site server (in New York State) after my death, but individual datasets may cease earlier if the collection software breaks and I am either dead or too ill to update it.

When the server shuts down, Webb-site (including all the editorial content since foundation in 1998) will disappear, but most of our articles can be found in the Internet Archive, which will hopefully keep running for much longer.

https://webb-site.com/articles/shutdown.asp

[traineeinvestor]

A great shame that HKU didn't pick up the offer to take over the data bases.

[shri]

A great shame that HKU didn't pick up the offer to take over the data bases.

Not surprised .. writing has been on various walls for quite a while.

[newhkpr]

"The relevant faculty heads were all in favour, but in a post-National Security Law environment, the detailed proposal was rejected by the university's "Senior Management Team""

This should tell you how much an education in the new HK is still worth. Sad to see. And sad to see Mr. Webb passing. He did a lot of great stuff for the city

[hullexile]

"The relevant faculty heads were all in favour, but in a post-National Security Law environment, the detailed proposal was rejected by the university's "Senior Management Team""

This should tell you how much an education in the new HK is still worth. Sad to see. And sad to see Mr. Webb passing. He did a lot of great stuff for the city

Like the mainland now with the Party overseeing each faculty.

[Elefant&Castle]

Love the old-skool style of webb-site - you can see his beginning with home computers in the 80s.

Sad to see it go - HK stock market badly needs people like him to shine a light on all the below board shenanigans in this market - and there isn't really anyone else.

[AsianXpat0]

https://webb-site.com/articles/shutdown.asp

First, I've been overwhelmed by the thousands of people who have taken the time to send me tributes and good wishes by email and social media since this announcement. Some of them have moved me to tears. While I don't have time to respond to everyone individually, I want you to know that each one of them means a lot to me and for my family to know how much my work has meant to others.
I have also received over 100 requests and offers to take forward Webb-site.com Reports, the Webb-site Database and its mission to enhance corporate and economic governance and public transparency in some way. I guess I've been doing something right since 1998. Well, I won't allow anyone to carry on Webb-site.com itself, because I would not want it potentially polluted or corrupted with clickbait, crypto-scams or worse, or used to advocate something of which I would not have approved. The editorial side of it has to die with me.
However, the Webb-site Database is a different matter, and as my final gift to the public interest, I plan to leave all of it, together with my self-developed collection software, in a public repository on GitHub, so that everyone who is interested now or in the future can take it forward. I won't be liable for what you do with it, and it will be under theCreative Commons CC-BY licence, a wide licence which allows commercialisiation and only requires attribution for the foundational database. It is my hope that at least one public-interest entity will see merit in continuing to collect data and make it freely available. Before I do this, I will need to clean out certain internal data that I have never made public, but I hope to get a first dump done in April, health permitting.

Update with what seems a sensible solution.

[newhkpr]

If no one picks up the updating work it won't be that helpful. But we all know why there can't be any volunteers to pick this up.