WeatherUnderground support folks ask for feedback

Two WU support folks have started asking for feedback at https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=33651.0;topicseen

Join the conversation, and try to be polite. I know there are many grumbles about what has happened with WU since The Weather Company/IBM took over.

This may be a good way to give honest feedback and help them focus on the PWS-owner issues with the services.

Best regards,’
Ken

this is good, having transparency :slight_smile:

Yes it is, Brian! So far (cross fingers), the conversation has been polite and even productive. The Webcam upload FTP limits seem to have been eased so maybe that will help. Additional problems are also being cited, so this looks like a good mechanism for the developers to see and respond to us.

They’ve also set up a Trello Board: https://trello.com/b/hqC0tb0u/weather-underground to track issues.

http://discourse.weather-watch.com/p/434535

What…did their paying customers complain? Just another company that takes our data for free and sells it. They have never given 2 hoots about us.

there is actually paying customers though
(people who pay for api data)

I think Masters and co did care back in the beginning, but now I don’t have a clue where PWS data fits in IBM’s strategy for WU and I suspect they don’t either.

I sure hope when they sell PWS data to real customers that they apply more sanity checking to it than they do to the stuff that shows on wundermap.

For you Niko. :slight_smile:

From things I’ve read, all the data from our stations is ingested into IBM’s Watson, as well as other data sources.
Then that data is sold for big $$$$ to commercial users.
So maybe they have found a lot of folks will, or have stopped supplying them all that free data. And that is their motivation to “fix” wu.
But, I’m not holding my breath.

My question is whether crowd sourced PWS data is really worth anything these days? Used to be that PWS data uploaded to WU was primarily from weather enthusiasts who had made some investment in a station, and software, and had some interest in generating accurate data. But now there’s a huge volume of data from cheap internet capable stations with poorly designed shelters. I hope Watson is smart enough to separate true microclimates from junk data…

Very True!