I had to get up at 4:30 this morning, arrive at the office at 5:30, spend two and a half hours manually deleting the rice WUs from my 100 machines, before getting on with my normal life. Needless to say I was not thrilled about it.

How about a little respect and consultation with the project participants who are your partners and not your servants?

What was the rush to bring the rice project up to speed so fast? There is no global shortage of rice as far as I know, just hoarding and financial speculation leading to the recent price hikes.

And whatever happened to beta testing before project rollout? I hate wasting machine hours on WUs that were not set up or tested properly. Being given credit for errors doesn't excite me, receiving credit for good work does.

DDTUNG

I don't object to e-mail. Reading the forum announcement is easy. Digging the one critical e-mail out of 200+ spam messages per day can be tedious, however.

I usually watch my own queues closely. If something starts behaving differently, I come in to the forum to figure out what happened.

Hello ddtung,
There were some Beta work units. Nevertheless, the full rollout caught a number of problems. Some work units caused a memory leak. This was easily replicated on the project machines, so the programmers tracked it down and fixed it in hours. Some work units wrote much larger output files than the Beta WUs did, so we increased the size limit. The project scientists made some errors forming the work units. Well, that is easily corrected with experience. Now they have the experience.

It was a smooth rollout, compared with some. Of course, we got some complaints because it took several hours to run the script that added the new project to everybody's preferences. Some eager-beavers complained that they would have to add it manually. We explained that they could just wait and it would eventually be added automatically. Of course, after that , we knew that we would then get the complaints from the reverse side of that coin. BOINC is not really designed for a project with multiple projects coming and going. It would be nice to have a more complex interface that allowed more choice. For the moment, we are looking forward to the end of the UD client, which will let us go to work implementing the standard BOINC server design and get the BOINC Account Manager fully operational.

I (personally) do not think that the staff will even consider adding complexity to the server code before we have implemented the BOINC standard.

But it never hurts to request a desired feature.

Lawrence

You missed the point. It is not always going to be at the top. I have already been to schools, when they still were schools. The wunes in skul now kant spel wurth a darn. I T I S V E R Y T I M E C O N S U M I N G A N D T A K E S T I M E T H A T I C O U L D B E U S I N G T O R E P L Y T O T H O S E T H A T D O N O T W A N T T O R E A D A N N O U N C E M E N T S .

I only have to look at the titles for some messages and toss them out.

Reading the forum announcements only takes a few seconds....even less if there is nothing new for today.

I got 29 more messages while I was working on this. There are also some useful messages and broadcasts that need attention in various ways.

sorry but i vote the other way.

i like the automatic opt-in, and if you want to be "democratic", well i think most crunchers prefer it too. consider that possibility.

not only are you are risking losing thousands of computers when a project ends, but you are suggesting that people limit their contributions.

also this issue is in the wrong forum since it is not specifically related to the rice project. try 'suggestions/feedback'.