@seippel BOINC Client has a Notice tab precisely for this situations, next time use it

Robokapp wrote:

Hi Robokapp.

That's interesting. It took me a minute to figure out you're talking about "dates." I understand what you're saying. My mistake.

I got a Zika work unit about 18 hours ago, and another about 4 hours ago. Maybe they'll pick up some momentum.

When I found my client was empty and inactive, my first thought was that I had a failure on my end. My next step was to check Notices, just in case, but there was nothing there, lending additional evidence that I had a failure on my end. Thanks to "faah_supporter" for pointing out that Notices would have been appreciated so people don't start thinking they're all having technical failures.

Planned Maintenance on June 13. Thanks.

My emotional state was getting slightly desperate by the time I started sifting through the forums to see if anyone else was reporting trouble. At first, I really had a lot of trouble getting information even from the forums. I was frustrated that I couldn't find any hints in the Android Support or Boinc Agent Support forums, including me thinking that a post titled "4/7" was from April, when it was actually July 4. No offense to Europe intended. I couldn't understand why it wasn't until I lost hope and dropped into the OpenZika forum that anyone was talking about the sudden loss of work units. Why should I have had to dig so deep before I found some discussion about what's going on, and to find that I'm not suffering a technical problem on my end?

A lot of desperation, frustration, and confusion could be saved if the project leaders might recognize that there are human beings involved in performing work for them, and we get concerned when there's an apparent breakdown when no one communicates to us that there's not actually any breakdown.

About 15 years ago, I had all my extra clock pulses devoted to Rosetta, and they just suddenly stopped putting out work around the Christmas holiday. A lot of people were frantic because there was no communications from the project personnel, and everyone was trying to figure out if their own computers were failing. When Rosetta started distributing work units again, they also deleted previous posts on their forum that expressed anger at their lack of communications. That's the first time I left a project for its lack of communication, although I don't suppose Rosetta really cared about my couple of CPUs. But I cared about them demonstrating the extent of their true obnoxiousness, and I haven't given them a clock pulse since then.

I don't see that level of inconsideration here, yet. So far, just a demonstration of a little ignorance about who's working for them.

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Furthermore, my Android client says:
. No tasks available for Mapping Cancer Markers
. No tasks available for Fight Aids @Home - Part Deux
. No tasks available for Smash Childhood Cancer
. No tasks available for Microbiome Immunity Project
. No [additional] tasks available for OpenZika

So, unlike faah_supporter who was totally devoted to Zika (which is a rather disgusting virus), my preferences are set to look towards Zika plus 4 other projects for work, and I leave it up to Boinc and the projects to decide who sends me work.

But -- no one has work!! Since there is happily no technical failure on my end -- only an annoying level of verboseness, it really comes down to an academic, technical curiosity about why all the projects are running out of work. So, it would be nice if there would be some "Notice," given the extent of The Universal Pause, just to let us little minions have some understanding about what's going on, on the other side of the connection. Surprise; we care.

If I get curious, I might check my other 4 projects, to see what their participants are saying about their Pause. Maybe someone knows a little more about why all the projects have dried up simultaneous.

I think I'm done. Looks like I'm averaging 2 posts per year, so I'm spasmodic but infrequent. Thanks for tolerating.

Only project I found providing Android units at the moment seems to be Seti@Home.

Hi all,

We had another conference call with the research team today. The prerequisite tasks for the new batches are progressing slower than expected. The current updated estimate is for new work to be available 1-2 weeks from now. Thank you all for your patience.

Seippel

Thanks for the heads up, not a massive issue, there’s plenty of other work to keep the cores hot.