Community sourced warning of rain gauge inaccuracy

[Syntaf]

Background

Wetrockpolice.com relies on a rain gauge located at the Red Rock Visitor center for hourly precipitation observations. Generally, this captures large weather patterns but often misses sporadic showers that might only hit Calico Basic or Black Velvet.

I introduced a "manual warning" on the site some time ago to call out when the rain gauge may be inaccurate, but this relies on me knowing keeping up to date with reports that rain fell in areas not captured by the gauge; if I'm out of town or not checking social media this feature isn't all that helpful

Proposal

Similar to how downdetector.com functions, it would be really cool if we could provide a button somewhere on the page that users can click when they think the rain gauge is inaccurate.

This button would not require any sort of authentication or account, so we'd want to protect the button behind a captcha and write to some sort of events table that can track the timestamp & IP address.

If a certain threshold is reached within a rolling window, a warning can be shown for ~24-48 hours after that threshold time range.

Requirements:

• A new persistence model to hold events. These events should have a foreign key to a watched area (e.g. Red Rock), an IP address, and a timestamp of the event.
• A design & implementation of a button somewhere on the landing page which is both clear and not intrusive to the minimalistic style.
• Logic during the rendering to enable the manual warning when a threshold after parsing recent events, and potentially a blurb about the quantity of events which triggered the manual warning.