Great job Weather Underground! Thank you for continuing to keep us informed of the great progress.
But there is nothing about this on the WebCam setup page. I've spent many hours trying to get FTP working this week. I finally deleted my account and signed up with a brand new one just to try to fix this.
Disable the feature, put a note up - something! Very frustrating. I only found this thread searching for some reason my brand new account still couldn't connect to the FTP server.
I hear your frustration. I totally agree with your request to be informed via the WU website and I've suggested it myself. As I've suggested that they have a systems status page with issue tracking and feature fix road mapping and resolution tracking. They responded (here in this forum) that it sounds like a great idea but that they just do not have the manpower to provide information in this manner. Same reason they can't answer the flood of emails they get. The fact that some WU employees even step in this forum is something that they have said they do on their own time.
Realize that WU needs us because they need our data. But we are not the customer, we are the product. Follow the money. The customer is the companies and organizations that buy the data. Even if you pay to remove ads (for those that don't have a weather station) you are still not the customer, you are just providing enough revenue to keep the services running same as the ads do. So that is just to cover running costs. You pay to remove ads and that's your only benefit, you aren't entitled to any other special services because of it.
That said WU does care about us and they listen to us through this forum. It is just that their resources are limited and one just needs to realize that things are not going to resolve themselves quickly because of all I've said...we are not the customer, hence the importance of our happiness is commensurate to what is required to keep things moving and their real customers happy and only incurring expenses that keep investors and shareholders happy. So of course if they totally didn't care about us and there were never improvements made then everyone would leave and stop providing data. It's about balance. So it will never be that they totally abandon our concerns...because they need us. We just need to be kept happy enough. Everyone is different and your level of tolerance for what you feel is right is going to be different, so there will be defectors at different levels of system functionality. That is something they can gauge and see happening. Empty threats don't matter. Trash talking doesn't matter. So I think it best to be patient, try to be part of the solution and offer constructive polite feedback, or just leave. If you are one of the first to leave then you really don't matter and they really don't need you, and you don't understand the dynamics of the service and where you fit in the puzzle. They have over 300,000 stations. When it starts getting really bad and you hear of many many people leaving then and only then does that mean that things must have gotten really really bad and very neglected. We aren't even near that point.
Ask yourself how bad and desperate are you for WU to be working at 100% functionality. And then ask yourself if that is because WU is the only weather service your weather station reports to? If that is the case then realize that there are other people to blame for your bad situation. Other people with this blame are the company that made your weather station. Why don't you demand from them that they add functionality so that you can utilize other weather services. Another part of the blame is for yourself if you didn't invest in the right weather station that lets you expand on the usage of your data. My weather station only provided data uploads to 3 services. But I expanded it (extra hardware and software) and now I report to 12 services plus my own SQL data backup and I could spin up my own hosted website if I wanted as many people do. So don't put your eggs in one basket. Lots of people have a weather station and they don't realize that it is even possible to add hardware and software (3rd party) to expand on your available services. So if you aren't informed and don't know how then read this forum and ask questions. There is plenty of help for that here.
Realize in this message when I say "you" I'm not singling you out....I'm saying "you" in the sense of everyone out there.