Fear the registering and agreeing to terms and conditions before downloading is one of the things WCG is not likely to change.

In past the team link was send along I think [seems not in the test mail to myself] thus something to consider. An added selection field, yes/no to insert that info may be a way around that. First order is for folk to get crunching, the team join link injectable via the personal message box at the end of the mail to limit it to just one mail from you as promoter. It might be something that WCG could insert in the welcome mail rather than you pushing the team motivation angle... that is, if there was some friend referral tracking in the process.

Maybe you can test this for me: Open the Tell a Friend page. Then change the field name where the member is entered to something your friends know and change the from email address to another, which is not your WCG mail account. Then mail to yourself this message i.e. put yourself in the <i>to</i> box. I tried and never received it back neither on the my grid or my alternate mail account. Only when the WCG account info is left in tact does the mail arrive back to me.

And a

Think there should be a copy back to the members mailbox confirming the message was issued... something like <i>thank you for telling your friend</i> as there might otherwise be a possibility to enter George Clooney's from box as transmitter.

The smoothing walks into a wall... BOINC was not designed with the different ways WCG has. For other project you just enter the mail account and password when attaching and it will create the account on the fly. At any rate, I've reported the mailing issue/suggestions. Maybe the custom pack for 6.10 will have additional improvements... a web page forced open in the default browser from the client and some cookie exchanges... but NoScript might not like that :|

I think th most important feature is Anonymous donation. Just install software and run, change project if you really want, and register user if you really really want. Folding at home has this mode both on PC and PS3 and thats one of the reasons they are having milions of users. Technically we could create anonymous user and just assign it as default once the client is installed. Then we can nag user after for example 1 work unit completed to register IF he wishes to.

We are interested in improving processes to make the system as easy to use as possible. However here are some things to consider:

1) Once someone registers on the website, 70% of them become active participants. This is an extremely good conversion rate considering that we are asking people to install something on their computer. We of course would love to see this as a higher number, but this biggest challenge is getting people to accept the concept of installing an executable from the internet on their computer. Years of work has been done to drill it into people's heads that installing applications from the internet is a bad idea and the whole concept of volunteer computing is fighting against that. This issue more than any else prevents that 70% from being higher.

2) Firefox changed their method of storing cookies with version 3.0 and up to use the sqllite db. Version 6.2 of BOINC (which we have here) cannot read the cookies. Version 6.10 of BOINC (which we are testing) does.

3) Around 30% of people who return at least one result, quit participating after less than 2 months. One change we hope will help this is that when people set the % cpu use for the client, BOINC limits the science applications to running to that % at most. Work is being done so that the 6.10 (version 6.10.32 and up) will throttle the science applications based upon total system cpu use. Therefore if you are doing some video encoding that is using 50% of your cpu power and BOINC is set to run at most at 60% of cpu power then BOINC will limit the research applications to running only at 10%. There is work being done to try to figure out how to assess if the machine is swapping memory heavily (this can cause slow downs on machines without much memory). The idea is that if the machine starts swapping, then the research applications will be paused for a certain length of time. This one is more complex to implement correctly so it will not make the 6.10 client.

4) We have talked about an 'anonymous client' that people could install. The issue with the anonymous client is that we lose the ability to stay in contact with the person. For example, we have an email that we send 60 days after a user stops contributing. We are able to get 29% of those people to become active again. An anonymous user would not receive that email. If we had the anonymous installer, we would probably get a few more people that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. However, some of the people that would have created a user id will opt to use the anonymous version. In the long run the anonymous client may result in lower participating overall.

Take a look at this presentation that I gave at the BOINC workshop, it provides some good information: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/attachment/wiki/WorkShop09/wcg.pdf

I am not sure if you see this as an advantaget or an inconvenience but it is strictly against the Conditions of Use that WCG be installed in a machine without its owner's agreement.

This is why an anonymous installation is very unlikely to happen (personal opinion only): it is too easy for anybody (not even a geek) to install anywhere without the owner being aware. Most people call such a software a trojan and it is not at all how WCG/IBM wish to be seen.