To elaborate on what I meant by rethinking the progress bar: we agree that we need to give the members some visual indicator to let you know whether a project is in its early days, nearing completion or somewhere in between. But that indicator needs to be at a more high level and the current use of a percentage complete is deceiving since there are too many unpredictable variables that impact how far along a project is for us to estimate the percentage with any level of accuracy.

I'm not sure what you could use for a high level indicator aside from periodic news items. You do one to announce the launch of a new project. Perhaps similar ones could be put out that say that the researchers estimate that we/they are about 25/50/75 percent complete with the computational phase of the project (with the typical caveats). Another could be done at 90 percent with an estimated date of completion. Should that change by much (say 30 days), further updates could be made. Being news items, it's going out via the official channels with probably any necessary legal review. News items don't rely on users getting on the fora either.

As for the Research Overview page, it is interesting to note that there is nothing there to specifically identify the percentages as percentages of project completion. Still, it's a very reasonable and understandable presumption. Perhaps we simply need to add a little something right below the "Active Research" label that says something along the lines of "Note: The percentages shown on this page do not represent the level of completion of a projact but instead are an estimate of the amount of computational work completed based on the amount of work done since the start of that project and the amount of work the project scientists currently plan to submit to WCG. As the planned amount of work can change at any time for numerous reasons, these percentages can increase or decrease significantly at any time."

It seems this thread has morphed into a suggestions thread and probably doesn't belong here but having said that,

Understanding that "Completion Date" is not a reasonable metric due to the stated uncertainties, would it be possible for WCG to provide 2 metrics for each active project:

1. A percentage of batches sent to WCG by the researchers that have yet to be sent to or completed by the members. WCG's Choice. This would be a metric of "known work" remaining to be processed. This percentage would move up or down as new batches are received from the researchers and is an absolute known quantity. At least members would have a reasonable idea of how much work is in the WCG queue.

2. Project status as a whole in three states. a: Just beginning b: In Progress c: Nearing Completion. Most projects would be in the "In Progress" state and wouldn't move to the "Nearing Completion" state until the researchers indicated that they were no longer considering any new targets.

There are many more metrics that could be provided but trying to minimize the work on the WCG staff yet provide something meaningful.

BTW, what is "BOINC ECD"? Is that even a thing? Looking through the BOINC documentation and code, I can't find it anywhere. I was trying to find out how BOINC calculated a completion date given the stated unknowns.

Estimated Completion Date
Cheers