What SignalsMonitor is

Who runs it

SignalsMonitor is operated by Melting Face, the trading name of the studio that builds it. The studio’s site is meltingface.lol. The product went live in September 2026. There is no newsroom and no paid edition. Questions and corrections go to hello@signalsmonitor.com.

How stories get here

A worker polls public RSS feeds and open APIs on a schedule. That includes news publishers, official weather and flood alerts, earthquake feeds, disaster bulletins, a small set of market quotes, and status-style public sources. Each item keeps its source name, a link, and the time it was seen. The site does not employ reporters and does not paste a publisher’s article as if SignalsMonitor had written it.

Items that describe the same event can be grouped into one story page. The page lists the publishers attached to that story and links out to them. A short excerpt is the publisher’s own text, trimmed for the card, and labelled as theirs.

The map plots a point only when the pipeline has a location it is willing to show. Some points are the place named in the report. Others are a coarse anchor, such as a country capital, when the text did not support a street or city. The label on the story says which kind of place it is. A marker is not a claim that the event happened at that exact building.

Editorial policy

How we source

SignalsMonitor is an aggregator run by Melting Face. Stories are taken from public feeds and open APIs. We do not commission reporting, interview people, or present a model’s guess as something a publisher confirmed. If a feed is wrong, the correction lives with that publisher. Email hello@signalsmonitor.com if a page on this site is mis-grouped, unsafe, or still up after the underlying report was withdrawn.

What we write ourselves

A story page opens with “What’s happening”, a short note in SignalsMonitor’s words. It names the outlets, the place the reports are tied to, and the headline. It is not a rewrite of the article. The publisher’s excerpt stays underneath, with a link to the original. Topic and place pages, such as Iran or the United Kingdom, use the same idea: a briefing built from the headlines and outlet names on that page, plus a map and a timeline. Those pages exist only when several stories and at least two outlets support them.

Byline

Pages are credited to SignalsMonitor, the product. There is no staff reporter byline, because nobody here reported the underlying story. The outlets that did are listed on the page as “Reported by”. In the page’s structured data, the author and the publisher are SignalsMonitor, and the publisher record names Melting Face.

What the labels mean

Source and publisher counts

“Sources” means distinct feeds or records attached to the story. “Publishers” means distinct newsrooms or domains. One publisher can file more than one update, so the two numbers are not always equal. The count is not a measure of truth. A single official alert can be solid. Ten rewritten copies of one press release are not ten independent confirmations.

Confidence

The percentage on a card is an internal score, not the chance that the event is true. The formula starts from how the evidence was labelled (reported, corroborated, inferred or unverified), then adds a small amount for how precise the location is and how long the text is. A single reported item with a country-level place lands near 58%. That is why many unrelated cards show a similar number. It does not mean those stories were fact-checked to the same standard.

Severity

Severity is a 1–5 scale shown as info, low, elevated, high or critical. Official alert wording (warning, emergency, earthquake magnitude) and a short list of words in the text (such as killed, attack, disaster) move the number. It is a sorting hint for the map. A sports story can be marked high if the wording trips the list. It is not an editorial judgment that the story is more important than another.

Breaking

Breaking is a separate rule checked in the background. It looks for fresh evidence that meets a bar for that kind of event: for example a significant earthquake, an official warning that is still in force, or a burst of new publisher reports. Routine market quotes are kept out of it. The public Breaking tab shows stories currently in that state. It is not a promise that every important story is marked, or that a marked story is still breaking when you read it.

Freshness and source health

Each card has a freshness label based on when the item was last seen. The live header counts feeds that are currently healthy. A feed can be healthy, degraded, paused, failed or retired. Paused feeds are not producing new stories. The roadmap records what the product will and will not do, including the rule that routine machine alerts should not drown out news.

Topics

Topic tabs group stories by category and, where the pipeline has one, by a broader subject such as world politics, business or weather. “Topics moving now” is built in the browser from words that repeat across recent headlines. It is a hint, not an edited list.

What else is on the page

• Live TV embeds public video the publisher allows. Playback depends on that publisher and on where you are.
• Cameras are a directory of public camera snapshots. Images stay on the publisher’s host. SignalsMonitor does not record them.
• Markets are delayed public quotes. They are not a trading service.
• Chat is a public room for readers. See the terms.

What this site will not pretend

SignalsMonitor is not a truth oracle. Reported, corroborated, inferred and unverified are different states, and the interface is supposed to keep them apart. It does not sell personal data, and analytics stays off until you accept it. Read the privacy notice for the exact list.