Suppose if you lend a computer out to friends, you're doing it lock, stock and barrel... including the already installed BOINC which is registered to your account. If you remove the account, and your friends have to register/add WCG anew, then the results will go to their account. You decide, but lending the computer out and letting them run under their own account and discussing what's it's doing [a little competition who does most in the borrowing period], creates interest with the friends. Important is a new *infected* member to spread the word :D

Happy crunching

--//--

As it stands, WCG is the only project where you can expand the display filter to show all historic device [installations] and their contribution to total back to your My Grid contribution, which mine btw has not done for years ;>). The default is to only show devices that have returned results in the last 7 or 14 days. Of course, that device counter number represents what very few would not like to change. More than often proposed to have an active device counter [the ones that show in the 7-14 day default filter]. At the very least have botched installs removed, those that never produced a result [the WCG global number we've been told, all returned at least 1]. I've got more than a few to include from experimenting with Alpha developer clients.

WCG has chosen to inflate the number (the 100,000 device addition challenge fell thoroughly silent). It's academic, beyond me how device counts could *inflict* (popular topic word since December) any form of issue on humans, but as this is the way for WCG drivers to satisfy the IBM Corporate sponsor to continue allocating millions of dollar annually to maintain the grid [expected to last indefinitely], co- and follow on fund research that otherwise would not happen, than I'm fully content with this. It's just a number [that I plot too in some viewable charts, without a label].

What we do is Crunch On, for a better and healthier world.

--//--

Because that's not the only issue.

e.g. I have a machine called r2d2. I don't run it much in summer, so it's not returned any results in the last month, so it's not on my default list at all. Let's say I want to change, or even check, its configuration. I select all devices and get 4 entries for that machine, sprinkled in among dups of other machines. Is that useful? No. It's just a bunch of junk in between live entries. The 4 entries for that one machine have no need to be separate and it would be far neater to be able to merge them somehow. At the very least, as SekeRob said, any that never produced a result should be able to be removed totally. (2 of them have registration dates just over an hour apart, so I bet that situation applies here.)

I can understand, there appear to exist too many devices from eons ago that were either temporary or extinct. Too much data is apparently distorted, there are probably not really 1,941,701 devices in the world.

Has anyone discussed the ability to donate badges to other accounts or people, or merge accounts and badges?

I agree Kremmen you have a point there. But it is like opening a pandora box. Then comes the merging of badges issues and who knows other effects. In my point of view tech resources are limited and must be used in priority for projects, and GPU crunching. In a lower priority level I would add additional badges for 5, 10, 25, 50, 75, 100 years of crunching. Your issue I am afraid would be at the lower bottom of the list.