Topic: Feedback received through our weather website

[lddaly]

We receive multiple emails a week through our wxcontact.php page; most of which is negative feedback (example below). In the past, my kids (now 15 years old) have replied to every message, which can be discouraging at times. Curious how you all deal with it... Do you reply, what do you say, or do you just ignore it? We are considering just removing the contact form and directing feedback to our social media accounts. Thoughts?

To: Webmaster

From:
name removed
address removed@gmail.com

Message:
Your UV index report is a joke. It only has the high for the day but the uv fluctuates so much during the day that that is not adequate.

If you can't provide current weather coniditions you shouldn't have taken on the responsibility of having a weather website.

I'm sick of people that just copy and paste stuff from other peoples sites and re post it just to gunk up the internet. Hopefully one day someone will find a way to stop that phenomenon.

Akismet Spam Check: passed
Sent from (ip address): ip removed
(host name removed)
Location: location removed
Date/Time: April 27, 2019, 4:41 pm CDT
Coming from (referer): http://www.planoweather.com/wxcontact.php
Using (user agent): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.103
Safari/537.36

[txweather.org]

I would just block him from your site if that user is harassing you. I gotten nasty emails as well... Mostly people hating because they are internet trolls and have no life.... Some times is an actual constructive criticism and I consider it... Is part of having an online presence

[waiukuweather]

you can get the solar and UV to plot on the graphs so that they will show up here
http://www.planoweather.com/wxgraphs.php
and that might please that person

[lddaly]

you can get the solar and UV to plot on the graphs so that they will show up here
http://www.planoweather.com/wxgraphs.php
and that might please that person

Thanks for that. I enabled the plotting of solar and UV on those graphs in Weather Display, but those are our least favorite graphs. My daughter did reply to this person with a link to our Weather Underground page, which does plot solar and UV clearly. It would be better to keep them on our site, but the http://www.planoweather.com/wxwugraphs.php script does not have a tab for UV.

[lddaly]

I would just block him from your site if that user is harassing you. I gotten nasty emails as well... Mostly people hating because they are internet trolls and have no life.... Some times is an actual constructive criticism and I consider it... Is part of having an online presence

This feedback originated from a dynamic CenturyLink IP, which would probably be ineffective to block. It is not one of our repeat offenders. My kids have definitely learned a lot about dealing with the public as a result of this project.

[lddaly]

After reviewing the feedback we have received so far this year, which was about 90% negative, we ended up removing the contact form from our Contact Us page and directing visitors to use any of our social media accounts for providing feedback. Messages received through those methods in the past have been much more pleasant . Anyways, it is one less script to maintain.

[Otis]

Interesting reading this.  I don’t receive a lot of comments but those I do are all either questions or thanks for maintaining the site.  The questions I always do my best to answer or point them in the right direction.  The Thanks I always tell them they are welcome.

I think it is great that your family is doing this; family time is some of the most important.  Keep it up, it is a good service you are providing for the community.

[lddaly]

Interesting reading this.  I don’t receive a lot of comments but those I do are all either questions or thanks for maintaining the site.  The questions I always do my best to answer or point them in the right direction.  The Thanks I always tell them they are welcome.

I think it is great that your family is doing this; family time is some of the most important.  Keep it up, it is a good service you are providing for the community.

Thank you. I do not know why this is the case with our site. We are a suburb of Dallas and currently see about 500 unique visitors a day on a normal day and from 3,000 to 5,000 when the weather is active. The feedback we received got so bad in late 2015 that we considered taking the site down. (One email we received said “Fix your FU**ING rain gauge!”) Instead, we posted more about who we are; that we are just a family with pre-teens at the time who provide the site as a community service. This did help with the feedback for a while.

[havtrail]

I actually did a study during my career in a service agency, and found that we averaged 100 complaints for every compliment, and that was when our business was growing. The 90% complaints mentioned by lddaly is pretty close to that.

I used that statistic to argue that we should weight every compliment by a factor of 100. Think about it - How many people call up or email their electric company when the power is working fine to say "good job"? People tend to speak up when they're unhappy. And then there are those people who are simply unhappy by nature...   

Rich K.

[Cutty Sark Sailor]

Constructive criticism looks like this:
PS: .....The website ..... no longer has a functioning captcha system so I'm emailing to this address in the hopes that you are the operator.
And of course, the recaptcha was repaired within hours, and a thank you sent... he went to a lot of trouble to call it to my attention.

Ain't got time for nasties.. heh..  .

[saratogaWX]

I haven't received 'hate mail' feedback (so far).. Like Cutty, I received a note that the webcam image was fuzzy.  Yep. aged cover had suffered crazing so a bit of headlight restorer and my son on the roof fixed it right up.  I, too, sent a thank you note back with the explanation.

[Jasiu]

All I ever get is spam which fails the reCAPTCHA test and gets tossed (after getting logged).

I'm wondering if the bots look specifically for pages with "contact" in the name or just crawl for forms? I'm tempted to rename my file just to see if it has any effect.

[Otis]

Ya know, having worked in the service industry - of sorts - I have always made a point of providing positive feedback, letting "them" know things are good.  Me, I wish more people would do that. Seems to easy and quick that we complain - we need to try and provide feedback when things are good/right too.

[the beteljuice]

Herein 'you' refers to the 'weather community'.

So how did the 'moaners' find you in the first place ?

Presumably you came high up in results of a search engine (well done !)

Perhaps the home pages should quickly reinforce that it is an amateur website with all the possible downtimes, errors, maintenance delays, etc. etc.  that are inevitable at some point. ?

In the chase for content and presentation you need to remember (and tell) it could be 'fake news' 

[yamiacaveman]

Hi Iddaly,

I don't get a lot of responses on my contact page, but I get a bit of everything.  Most positive, some telling me something isn't working, and for the past 6 months I get 1 that is going to expose me XXX if I don't pay up.

The only ones that bother me are the ones that are in bad taste. I remember when my son was young, well, you try to protect them, but sorry to say, the only way to do so is not to get involved in online things. By now, your children probably know and are exposed to more than you think, and I think the best you can do is to  explain that this is reality with online stuff, acknowledge that it exists and move on. Of course it is up to you to decide what to do.