Sorry, David - I don't care enough about meta tags to campaign on your behalf.

Search engines that rely on them are bad. Why pander to them?

Better meta tags would be nice, but I'm going to pick my battles carefully.

David,
You have already got three, which should show you that we do care and that we do it more seriously than you do. Obviously we all say that your work was not serious, to say the least.
Personally I am not too far from thinking that it is also dishonest and that its purpose might be to discourage the silent readers (*) of this forum from going on contributing.

Sekerob and me are looking at stats each on our side, and we are doing it from a different perspective: Sekerob likes looking at runtime and I prefer points because I think runtime is no longer a valid way of measuring the work done. However both of us come to the conclusion that WCG's work is increasing rather rapidly. Sekerob works on the totality of daily results while I have collected them back only to January 1st, 2006.
We have not stolen this input or forged the numbers we have only taken the time to collect them from where they are available to anybody, for example Statistics History

So if you prefer to make a quick and dirty job on 70 days to support the latest of your "great ideas" it is up to you. But then don't feel frustrated if you are not taken seriously.

Regarding your efforts to influence WCG's referencing on the web I am sorry for you that it had not boosted WCG's increasing rate, but at least the good news is that it has not killed it either.

Cheers. Jean.

(*) To date there have been about 6000 posters for 84,444 registered members.

David,

The major search engines (Yahoo, Google) do not pay much attention to the meta tags. Some of the key items that they do look for is what text is visible on the home page and what text is visible from links on the home page. Additionally, they look for websites that have a lot of links from other websites that share similar topics (especially if the website is considered a significant website).

We are interested to see if the widget helps the link count aspect of this - we will have to wait and see. Unfortunately there is no way for us to find out exactly how we are being ranked and find out what helps and doesn't help since everyone keeps their algorithms private.

Beyond this we have been really looking at our web analytics data to understand the use of the website and how users navigate. We are looking at making some changes to the registration process due to some of things we found.

Additionally, we have been looking what can be done to help keep current members interested and involved. The Team Challenges feature and badges were created to help retain enthusiasm. The periodic newsletters and mailings with new project launches are also designed to keep the interest high.

We also added the XML interfaces to help and support the many external team websites that want to capture some of the data from our system so that they can display the data on their websites. We recognize that these external communities are very important to helping keep interest high among our users.

Also - one very important thing to remember when you are looking at runtime versus members. We are undergoing a transition from the UD Agent to the BOINC agent. Both agents are set to run at 60% by default. However, the UD agent if left undisturbed will record 24 hours of runtime in a calendar day. The BOINC agent is more likely to record about 12 hours of runtime (the 60% cpu time is only 60% of cpu time the operating system allows the agent to run). This is because the UD agent measures wall clock time while the BOINC agent measures process execution time. The same amount of science is performed in that period but the BOINC agent records less run time. This means that as the members have adopted the BOINC agent the amount of science performed per second of run time has been increasing.

Yep, no doubt about it, but for now we have the RSS feeds PER FORUM. A blessing in disguise as i added all the support fora and member news/known issues to my live feed bar, hit the 'read all' buttons for each and now only review the feeds in the Firefox Sidebar once in a while for posts previews that catch my attention. No more 'A day in a Life' threads pass my screen unless i go out to the forum.

hey why don't you Euros do the rest of us a favor and chill out ok?

DA's graphs show a 5% increase in members and 11% increase in crunch-years.