Recruiting and retaining volunteers is clearly important to the sustainability of the program. Much of what we have worked on recently is intended to help us attract volunteers and encourage them to continue contributing, and has been driven by the valuable feedback we received in last year's member study. The biggest criticism we heard was that volunteers wanted to better understand the value of their contribution. So we have put a lot of effort into improving our communications, giving volunteers more control over the news you want to hear , and we've started working with the researchers to set expectations about the frequency and quality of project updates. The new project timeline feature for active projects is another way of charting a project's key milestones and highlights. As for recognizing volunteer contributions, we recently added higher level badges and the ability to get recognized for introducing friends and family to World Community Grid . As always, there's more than can be done and no shortage of ideas of how to better serve our wonderful volunteer community - our top priority continues to be supporting the research, so we constantly have to balance our time and resources against that.

I appreciate jhindo taking the time to enumerate the efforts which have been made to make the crunching experience better. I acknowledge some crunchers need more recognition than is currently available, but do see that progress is being made. I see no reason to belittle the efforts made so far.

Cheers

Just out of curiosity, am I reading the following chart correctly? Is the golden line near the bottom of the chart that slopes down and to the right the one that indicates the number of active users?

Thanks Sgt. Joe.

So not to put too fine a point on it I'll just observe that we've essentially gone from about 100k active users in 2009 to 70k active users in 2014 - plus or minus a few thousand because of the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. And but for the bump we got from the Ripple giveaway from Q4-2013 to Q1-2014, that probably would have been somewhat worse.

Coleslaw: You may very well be right, but the fact of the matter is that sending out one survey in a decade is not the way to address the issue. As I've noted previously, if WCG were a business, its customer service model would be most similar to the DMV - you'll get it OUR way when and IF we feel like giving it to you.

Granted, there were improvements in response to that survey, but do we really have any doubt that the only reason it was done was because WCG was forced to do it? I mean come on. It was the first time in a decade that they really made an effort, a serious effort to reach out to volunteers in a truly meaningful way and that was only because of the drop in active users. If there had been no drop off, I'm confident the survey never would have been done. This is the sort of 'brushfire' mentality we're dealing with - if something doesn't look like it's getting ready to burn the house down, it's not a priority.

It's this apathetic attitude that is the issue. In this regard I once again come back to the issue of the forum software. If WCG really wanted to retain members, what they would do is try to build a community. Communities require a place to interact and this software makes that about as easy as sending smoke signals to one another. But upgrading the forum doesn't even make the to-do list.