Dear friends,

I would appreciate any help with this:
The weather module shows the moon icon, no matter which time of day. Temperature is fine, 5-day forecast shows the sun icon, updates "on the hour", but the main icon is always the moon, no matter what time during day and night.
Please see attached screenshot taken at 2pm local time.

I do believe this to be an issue with the weather servers, if I change location to a European city, it works fine. Most (all?) cities in the US show the moon icon though, across all day.

Would you please let me know if there is a way to point to a different weather server or any other way to correct this?

Thanks!

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

This is actually a lot more complicated than it looks at first sight lol

The weather module will normally display a moon or sun according to the current time in the target location (e.g. if you are in the US and is night time there but you ask for the weather in an European city where it is already day time, the module will display a sun).

This means some calculations must be done in relation to target time and timezones.

Each country in the Weather module internal database has a default timezone (in relation to GMT). This might not be 100% accurate at times (because of daylight savings time, etc), but is better than nothing.

The MSN Weather feed also has a "timezone" field, and I *think* at some point it returned accurate information regarding the timezone of the target location. Given that, whenever possible I used the information in that field rather than the default timezone. Alas, the timezone field in the MSN Weather feed is now returning "0" for all countries (instead of, say, -6 for GMT-6). Not sure when this started to happen.

This is what is causing the problem, to the weather module Austin, TX is now somewhere in GMT + 0 (i.e.; 6 hours ahead) and although for you it is still day time, the weather module thinks otherwise based on the Sunrise and Sunset times that it gets from the Lat and Lon coordinates for Austin, TX.

I've fixed this for next release so that if the value in the timezone field is "0" it is then ignored and the default timezone for that country is used instead.

Thank you for your reply.

On a purely informational basis: I have been using Winstep Nexus for many years now and am grateful for such a great piece of software.

This problem is not new, it starting happening quite a while ago, probably more than a year ago. It used to work fine once though.

If I am understanding your reply correctly, we don't have to do anything, just wait for the next update, right?

Also, and just to bring to your attention since you're tweaking this: Some location from the dropdown menu show "N/A" (for not available) when chosen, example: USA/TX/"Austin/Bergstrom"
Maybe there is a way to update the list of locations.

Thanks!

I'm located in GMT so my timezone is the same as 0, which explains why I never noticed until you pointed it out.



Yes.



Once again thanks for bringing this to my attention.

The internal locations database what created many years ago based on the main Weather.com feed and Weather.com codes, it supports many thousands of cities all over the world. This worked well for many years, and the weather module even had other fallback feed providers (Yahoo, Google and the MSN feed).

Unfortunately the Google and Yahoo feeds are now dead and the Weather.com feed is behind a paywall.

The only working feeds left are METAR (for locations with an airport and current conditions only) and Microsoft's MSN feed. The MSN feed works with most weather.com codes but not all, which is why Austin/Bergstrom fails - it does have a saving grace though, you can actually use the NAME of the location as a sort of "search string" and give it to the feed.

So, I've changed the logic for next release so that the modules tries again using the actual location name if using the weather.com code fails. Didn't try with other locations but it works well for Austin/Bergstrom, it should work with most other locations too.

Something you can do NOW if you run into this issue with other locations is to actually clear the weather.com field in the Weather Settings panel. The version you have already uses the location name if there is no weather.com code.

More than happy to help out beta testing in case you need people helping out in different timezones.

I don't get email notifications when you post a reply here, best would probably be if you send me an email to the email address used signing up for this forum.