[digging]

How exciting. I'm a huge fan of ants and I didn't know about AntWeb. Insects tend to be harder to find identification resources for than spiders, which is what I spend more time on. However, this site seems to exceed any individual digital resource I know of for spiders.

RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm not associated with any research organizations but maybe I should be.

[xipho]

I would first engage, if you haven't, the spider community at iNaturalist. It is likely that others are thinking along the same lines as you.

We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely interested in facilitating the structuring of communities that link people like you to those doing the science behind the scenes, this is really important for the long term stability of resources like those you're interested in.