Considering WeatherFlow Tempest or?

I think the confusion maybe that from the Google Play Store you can click on the link to WeatherFlow’s Privacy Policy and you end up here: https://help.weatherflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/206504368-Privacy-Policy

This is filed away under the support articles for “iKitesurf, iWindsurf, SailFlow, FishWeather & WindAlert”. From that page you can click on the link to see the “Terms & Conditions for Consumer Services”. These T&Cs do indeed talk about monthly fees and subscriptions etc., but they are not (I believe) applicable to the Tempest systems. They are applicable to iKitesurf, iWindsurf etc., which are paid-for WeatherFlow services.

I can see why confusion might have arisen though, so it might be better for WF to replicate the Privacy Policy under the “Tempest System & Smart Weather Stations” section of their support website as well.

I will tag @WFsupport here in case they want to make any changes.

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Concerning the “link”… When I put “got.wf/Tempest-start” into Google Chrome I get an error - not found. I tried a prefix of “https://” still an error. “http://” error. Even threw in a “www.” error. So the link does not help. If it goes to the same instruction page I have seen in my hunting around then it is woefully inadequate. What I found says nothing about graphing or other things that as you suggested you might find just buy poking around. Why should a user have to go “poking around” to find additional features? Yes, softcopy is common and that is fine. Is there a comprehensive softcopy manual for Tempest? None that I could find. If there is such, please send me the complete link.

The T&C I am referring to are part of the Android app “Tempest Smart Weather”. You are asked to read and accept the T&Cs and Privacy information before being allowed to proceed when installing the app. A few paragraphs down is where they begin talking about monthly and annual fees etc.

Thanks, Dave…

with a caps T it won’t work indeed. Webservers are ‘linux’ world were caps or not are important.

got.wf/tempest-start : will work.
got.wf/Tempest-start : will not work

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Peter,
I cannot get to the T&C unless I uninstall the app and reinstall. However, if you install “Tempest Smart Weather” on an Android device you are asked to accept T&Cs and Privacy statements. There are links from the app to read these items and a button to “Accept”. In the T&C a few paragraphs down they begin speaking about monthly and annual fees including warnings that should you cancel, the unused portion of your fees will not be refunded or prorated. If I had a spare Andriod phone I would do the install again and attempt to capture these T&C’s for you, but I don’t have a spare. My wife saw the same thing when she did her install, so I am not making this up. Having worked with software folks in the past, it is possible that these T&Cs are legacy information that should have been deleted when something was copied over to be edited for its current purpose. I looked on my phone again under the app and clicked on “Developer Contact” thinking that there might be a link there but there is only a link to the Privacy policy. I suspect that if I uninstall the app I might loose the data I have collected and I am reluctant to do that.
Dave…

You don’t loose data when un installing the app. The data is on servers and the app only shows you your portion.

You just have to login in again with the same credentials after install and you get all back as it was.

I never thought you were - sorry if I gave that impression.

I have just uninstalled and reinstalled myself and found the T&Cs you were talking about.

I think this is probably close to what is happening. I think you are being pointed to “catch all” T&Cs, some of which are applicable to Tempest, and some of which are not. The actual link you are being pointed to is this: https://help.weatherflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/206504298-Terms-Conditions.

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That is why I couldn’t find them. I just installed the app and selected Create Account. The Terms of Service link to https://help.weatherflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/206504298-Terms-Conditions and Privacy Policy link to https://help.weatherflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005036994-Privacy-Policy-for-Smart-Weather.

5 posts were split to a new topic: URL sensitive to case or not?

What you see is basically the fact you ‘selected’ the time line (like you would any other line) and it inverts the line. Most probably when you go again to a graph the line will show ‘normal’ and readable.

except that got.wf/Tempest-start does work for me

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Hi Dave. Welcome to the Tempest community! Sorry for all the hassle but glad to see you’re figuring things out despite our somewhat chaotic documentation situation. Our goal is to make everything “intuitively obvious to the casual observer” but we don’t always hit the mark. Likewise, apologies for the slow response from our support team. They have definitely been knocked on their heels a bit with all the new Tempests coming online. We hired a couple new agents in anticipation of this growth, but alas it wasn’t quite enough to keep up with our usual level of support. We are doing everything we can to restore that!

This is a really good question and the answer is, unfortunately “no”. At least, not as a single download or something you can easily print off. That said, you can hopefully find everything you need to know through our support website. We update the pages here quite often (one of the reasons we don’t have a printed version or a single PDF download). Everything else you might want to know (along with a bunch of stuff you may not want or need to know, but it’s usually fun and interesting anyway!) can be found on this forum! :slight_smile:

But we do agree it would be nice to have a single, comprehensive manual, and that is a goal of ours. We’re just not quite there yet, and I’m not sure when we will be. Many features are still in development or some stage of flux.

The very short story on the graphs (longer story is somewhere in the pages of this forum) is that the graphs used to be a single tap from the main view, which used to be the “card view” - this view is now brought up by tapping the Tempest icon in the upper right corner of the main view. Now that the main view is a higher-level “now+forecast” view designed to give you the most important/relevant weather data first, the graphs are two taps away from the main view.

Also note, the “graph” feature actually preceded the “history” feature, which as you can probably tell is a completely well-formed concept yet. We’re working to bring that all back together and be the most intuitive weather app around… but we’re not there yet.

Hmm, the screenshot you shared of the web app looks like you may have accidentally selected the text labels in the absicissa with your mouse. Hit “esc” on your keyboard and it should look like this:
image

This is a legacy issue of sorts, but you can blame the legal/business people here, not the poor software/technical folks! The issue is that WeatherFlow, which has been around for over 20 years, has several other lines of business and we currently cover them all with just two T&C documents: one for “consumer services” and another for “commercial services”. I’m impressed that you read one of them, and I apologize for any confusion that created. We probably should separate them out, but there is in fact a good bit of overlap and our lawyers said it would cost more to make another document :smiley: (PS: we have a similar issue with our support website in general: we only have one support website to handle a bunch of different, sometimes overlapping stuff: professional services, consumer services, Wind & Weather Meters, as well as Tempest & Smart Weather - we’re working to resolve that as well).

Good find! This constitutes a bug report, and it’s fortunately one that’s easy to fix. As @eric points out, we do run on Linux servers. And it’s true that Linux is more case-sensitive than Windows machines in general. But there is also a “no case” flag we can add to our short URL server’s redirect rules. I just did that, so now any combination of case will work. Try it! http://gOt.Wf/TeMpEsT-sTaRt

Thanks again for your persistence and understanding, Dave @cochrun . We like to say “Tempest is more than hardware” and that includes not just the back-end software but also all of the PEOPLE who contribute to improving the product and the Tempest community. Your are already contributing with your bug report, above, which will hopefully prevent future frustration from the same issue. We’re all looking forward to your future contributions!

PS: @vreihen, if you don’t like our “cutesy” got.wf short URLs, you are welcome to memorize and type out the full address when you want to go to the getting started guide: https://help.weatherflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047221633-Tempest-Quick-Start-Guide :smiley::smiley::smiley::smiley:

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You’re telling someone who programs in the Unix/Linux “vi” text editor that something is too long to type? :rofl:

Seriously though, the old Air/Sky boxes that I have all have “http://got.wf/…” on the inside flap. The Tempest box that I have only has “got.wf/…” in that spot. Note that this forum’s software doesn’t even recognize the .wf top-level domain as a possible URL, so how can anyone fault an end-user for not knowing that this is pointing them to a web page? I guess that residents of the islands of Wallis and Futuna (Internet TLD .wf) would recognize it, but I digress.

Anyway, can you make a suggestion that the package be updated to include http:// or https:// in the future?

Alternate suggestion: buy a roll of these in sticker form and stick them onto the flap in each box, and save even more typing:

Screen Shot 2020-06-10 at 4.50.32 PM

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I love QR codes…One of the greatest inventions. In Asia you will see them on signs. They are printed large enough to read from a passing vehicle.

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heckuva good way to make somebody click on something taking them to a malware page…

That’s true with every type of link.

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I’m just saying… type once, redirect everywhere!

The marketing/wordsmithing people say less text is always better, but I think that’s a great idea. Consider the suggestion made and implemented in the next production run.

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Well what do you know, yes that does work. I got the link with the upper case T from a response from David D. Nelson (gizmoev) time stamped June 10 9:04 am. So, GIGO if you know the acronym. Now the message from this person indicate that he is some kind of test person so I assumed (an error on my part) that what he sent me was correct. The same gentleman in his next message guided me very specifically and correctly to where I could find RainCheck. So probably an unfortunate typo on his part. So one mystery is cleared up. Thanks!

Thanks Peter. Glad you were able to find them.
Dave…

David, Glad you were able to find them.
Dave…

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Please remind the marketing folks about the little people behind the scenes, who labor to deliver on their promises… :wink:

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