This is from a long time WD and Forum user (who I won’t name). They sum up the thoughts of a number of users who have PM’d me in the last week or two concerning the attitudes of some people when reporting WD problems. Before hitting the ‘Post’ button next time, please read this and see if your post could be made more polite.
There are times when we all get frustrated with our hobby, however please remember this is a hobby, no matter how much we would sometimes like to think what we do is vital... It AIN'T!We pay a paltry sum for our Weather Display software, and never have to pay again for upgrades and improvements. Can you say that for the operating system most of us use… Nope it costs more and more often than not causes much bigger problems and we have to pay for upgrades…
If you have a problem honestly the odds are that it is a setup or configuration problem and that the majority are not experiencing the same problem, but if you post details ( reproducible step by step instructions) including your station type, WD version and as many details as possible if other users confirm the problem then 99% of the time the Author will do all he can to try and determine what the problem is and fix it.
However with WeatherDisplay we are dealing with dozens of different weather stations being supported, many of which are nothing short of a pita to try and code for, and 100’s of different hardware platforms with varying CPU types, amounts of RAM and disk space. No wonder there are some issues, in fact if there were not any issues then I would believe that all problem posts are deleted… Oh no that would be that OTHER Weather Software that doesn’t even support their own Forums directly any longer…
In other words folks… Step back, take a deep breath, chill pill, drink a beer… whatever it takes to post courteous posts and when you do hit one of those mystery issues just try and remember WeatherDisplay never caused anyone to die and it just isn’t worth losing sleep over…
My Two Cents…
There seem to be more impolite posts relating to bugs in the beta versions…if you don’t want the hassle of finding problems and you can’t live with bugs not being fixed immediately THEN DON’T RUN THE BETA VERSION. Simple as that. With many beta products you will find that releases are weeks or months apart so bugs take a long time to fix. For example the last beta release of the forum software I use was in March. I don’t use the beta version for obvious reasons! Beta testing is an exercise in patience whilst helping the author to find and eradicate bugs. If you’re impatient and post messages that upset the author then don’t expect to get much help back, especially if you’re the only person reporting a particular problem.