Bump for stupidity's sake (SMH on this brainless decision)

You're taking some of the fun and gamesmanship out of this which keeps people interested.

Is WCG trying to kill their own project?

I think its a matter that they just dont understand our point of view. They look at it as a technical job, where we look at it as a passion, a sport, an honourable challenge.


- it will be forgotten unless we crunchers can demonstrate why granular progress bars are imperative.

You know how hard it is to recruit new crunchers? Our only reward, apart from higher electricity bills and worn out computers, are badges and watching projects slowly being completed, cancer and zika being slowly vanquished before our very eyes, by our very own computers. In other words, the very thing that has just been scrapped: progress indications.

I joined in 2008, and have had a total of 13 devices connected over the years, including three which burned out due to 24/7 use. But Im not complaining! For me, a burned out device is one of the worthwhile "costs of doing business".

I wish WCG would see better, more informative progress bars as a worthwhile "cost of keeping crunchers happy".

Of the 126 crunchers who signed up the same day I did, way back in November 2008, only 13 are still active .
Thats a miserable 10% retention rate!

You can't tell me they all died!
You can't tell me they all signed up again under a different name.
You can't tell me they didnt want to contribute!
But I bet I can tell you why they arent crunching after being interested enough to load the app and try it. Its because there was not enough motivation! You must have things like progress bars to keep people hooked!

God knows I have asked so many of my friends to join the fight - I have 1500 friends on Facebook. Although you sometimes get a bit of "Oh that sounds like a good idea" I have only managed to get one recruit in 11 years.

WCG must be aware how hard it is to stop this churn, to improve this truly pitiful retention rate, to get volunteers to stay after their initial sign-up. Exit interviews could be done when they quit. But its pretty obvious to me already why most people quit, as one cruncher put it on this same forum:



Already some long term crunchers have quit over this misstep, including this member who contributed 288 years since 2006. Not only that, he was a valuable source of technical info with 847 informative forum posts. Many others have threatened to quit. And probably even more have decided not to give as much as they could, because they have no idea whether they can reach a certain badge in the next few months.

Once again, I wish no disrespect to the WCG techs. We appreciate they are hard at work on Climate change, and the old system was time consuming and at best a guesstimate. But it kept us motivated! And future recruiting and higher retention rates will be facilitated by things like informative, granular progress bars.

I would encourage other crunchers to post to this forum their thoughts about this matter.

Its the best and only place our collective voices will be heard.

And even then a change will only happen only if enough of us actually do speak up .

Hi,
NO, as I can't get data from the project itself, unfortunately.

WCG did provide "end date" in the past, that has been lost.
WCG did provide % in the past, that has also been lost.
WCG didn't provide the total number of WUs, that has certainly not planed to implementation.

So there's no data to calc from. We're completely lost & blind.

That exactly what we need.I am very disappointed that an expert as Klick
feels "so lost and blind"!
Just hope an issue cud be found at last.

As far as I can tell, HSTB was not broken. The known work had run out and more work was slowly coming through but the prospective quantity was unknown, so the calculable % was 100.

The spreadsheet that I use to determine which projects to do next still holds the last available % for each project, with the approximate end date based on the % and the project start dates, frozen at the system change.

That tells me that Zika might end in December 2019, Aids 2 in April 2020, MCM in January 2021 and MIP in 2029.

However, we know that new phases can come along to extend projects or funding can be constrained to shorten projects.

My spreadsheet also tells me how many threads each project needs to achieve my next badge before those end dates. I then decide which projects to pursue with how many threads based on personal preferences.

Mike