The power of WOW is in its community nature and as such the Met Office does not wish to act as Big Brother. WOW has some simple tools that will allow the WOW community to moderate any content which is felt to be incorrect or inappropriate. You must be logged in to "Report" any Site content or Observation.

Reporting observations suspected as being incorrect.

If an observation or a value within an observation appears to be incorrect then a registered user can report the observation (provided you are logged in). It will only be removed from display if 3 different users report the same item. The owner of the observation is notified and has 3 options available:

  • Make the needed correction and mark it as now OK
  • State that the reported item is actually correct
  • Permanently remove the item from display

Once the owner has taken one of the above actions, the report is cleared.

Reporting content that is deemed inappropriate.

Unfortunately, there is always a small minority who look to sabotage sites such as WOW. We have identified a number of areas where a user could place inappropriate content onto WOW. Anything that is reported as 'Inappropriate' is removed from display immediately. A moderator is informed and the item in question is reviewed. A number of possible actions may then follow:

  • If deemed OK, the content will be re-instated to the site.
  • If confirmed as inappropriate, the content will be permanently removed from WOW.
  • There is a likelihood that the offending user's account will be terminated and banned from future use of the WOW service.

Any user who seeks to publish inappropriate content onto WOW will be in breach of the Terms & Conditions of Service which the Met Office takes very seriously.

If you have reported items...

Reported items will show up against a Site on your Sites page (requires user to be logged-in).

An icon will appear at the right of the row in question. Clicking on this will allow you to review the reported item and take one of the actions detailed above.

Messages from the Moderator

A Moderator can send any user of WOW a personal message; such a message will appear above the map on the homepage when you log on to WOW. A warning message will appear with a red border, and an information message will appear with a blue border.

All messages from the Moderator must be acknowledged. This is done by clicking on the blue "Acknowledge" button above the message.