IIRC This is my first post under this id as i discontinued use of boinc for a 10 months period sometime last year and could not obtain the old id/pwd, so hello (again) to everyone.

Forgive any improprieties or ignorance on my part as 1) I am pretty busy and don't spend any time at all reading up on the projects unless something goes wrong and 2) I am writing this in anger after having seen for the umpteenth time that the points assigned for the correct conclusion of a work unit were only about 40% of what the software claimed for it, and as a direct result in the last week I have been pulling back considerably on the amount of time and resources my system dedicates to working for the community.

From my point of view, the point system and in particular what is claimed vs what is awarded is extremely unfair. We give our systems and (when something goes wrong or manual intervention is required) often enough our time for free: aside from when we are gaming or performing some necessary work, some of use give over all of our systems's resources to medically-targeted distributed computing because of course it's a wonderful cause. Regardless of how many resources we assign to this taks, we do this not only for free, but many of us leave our systems on 24/7 to work on these projects and unlike with some scientific / cryptographic challenges, get nothing whatsoever in return, not even the hope of the chance at winning something. That means that aside from the computer resources and our time we actually fork out money for the power usage and of course we put a constant strain on the hardware, at the very least increasing the chances of hardware failures, and in certain cases actually bringing them about or hastening them, so more money and time for repairs/replacements. We also do this knowing that any benefits reaped will likely be in the form of patentable discoveries and that someone will make sh..edloads of money out of our goodwill. We do this and get absolutely nothing in return. Aside as a showoff piece, especially for great performers, the point system is worthless since you cannot use your points to, for instance, create a free home page, trade or even buy storage or customizations for it, or even just trading points for customizations for our forums post like other projects / sites do. The badges are, of course, completely pointless as we can see well enough what someone dedicates their resources to by their points as often posted about on many a forum / web page.
I skimmed over the info on the system by which points are credited, and just can't believe it. They cannot be used or traded in any way, shape or form and still you deal them out with the same .... thrift ? as if they had an actual monetary value, there's even a cap of 2x the "comparison device", so throwing all the resources of increasingly common, high end 4 cores workstation won't necessarily result in more points for your pc's hard work and your commitment.

Is there an actual rationale for this ?
Is there any impediment to setting up a simple scheme by which you can trade points for things like:

- a customizable, public "home" page with the details of your activities and a picture + some info about the contributor (even with a cap on size)

- getting customization strings, icons, avatars, titles etc. for forum posts

- any other reward system that provides an actual, non-monetary and very inexpensive, but still palpable benefit however small - to the contributor.

Can we not try to work out something fairer to the contributors ?