First, you are not alone in being frustrated at the lack of communication from WCG, especially when it comes to both system outages and work unit shortages. Many of the regular, most vocal contributors including myself have vented on here the past couple years. You're not alone!

If there's updates, there's usually threads posted (during or a day or two after the fact when systems are up) in the News subforum.

Sometimes the outages only affect the WCG Forums (here) but not the BOINC work systems, so it's impossible to get help here. There used to be updates posted on Facebook and/or Twitter, but that's not consistent. I agree the silence can be frustrating.

To give them a bone, they're severely understaffed and underfunded. Dr. Jurisica is contributing finances from his own lab grants to WCG, when really this burden should fall on Krembil/University Health Network (the largest academic research organization in Canada?), especially since they get all this free advertising and goodwill. Dr. Jurisica has prioritized any funding to the actual systems, but there's not enough to hire more dedicated staff.

We have a part-time communications professional (TigerLily at the moment), and she does a good job interfacing between us and the technical system and database admins in the datacenter. We DO usually get explanations and some technical details about why systems went down, but it can sometimes take a few days or a week or so after the fact before we get any updates. During the time of the outage when there are no forums, no updates on Facebook/Twitter, no BOINC notices in the apps (which would be a perfect place to put status updates assuming BOINC is up). It's definitely a pain point. There's also a decades-long feature request for a more out-of-the-box BOINC "Status Page" like other BOINC projects, but IBM heavily customized WCG when they were in charge, so it would take many hundreds of hours of work to undo all that customization.

To recap, you're not alone in being frustrated as hell at the work unit shortages or the lack of communication.

There's good news at the least -- MCM work units were backlogged on the Results page since... November 2023. But the past week the processes have been stable and we're seeing some major progress. November and December 2023 are deleted, and we just have January, February, and March 2024. Hopefully in the next week!

MCM reverted from sarcoma work units (started about 2 years ago) back to ovarian cancer (the target before sarcoma), so that's what we're all crunching now. I don't know when ovarian will be done again and we can finish up sarcoma. And there's a few other cancer targets Dr. Jurisica talked about. I know pancreatic cancer was one of them and I hope it's chosen next. I think maybe prostate and other cancers?

Africa Rainfall Project -- there's talk about it resuming soon, but we'll see. If/when that does, it may drag down the whole system again since the results are massive.

Smash Childhood Cancer has been on hold but I hope there's more soon.

Honestly I almost think Help Stop TB should be retired since the researchers moved to a new university. Either close the project or give us an update if we'll resume in 2024.

Again, I'm just as annoyed or frustrated as you. You are not alone. Lots of people have just left or never came back. I just deal with the frustrations. Maybe if I win the $1 billion lottery I can start my own research organization and then see if I can take on WCG haha.

But for now, all we can do is run backup BOINC projects or other non-BOINC projects. I really like Folding@home -- there's plenty of CPU and GPU work from different researchers around the USA/world. Lots of cancer, influenza, COVID, etc. It's just a totally different system, app, stats, learning curve to use Folding@home's "Advanced" page.

The other option is just dealing with the lack of work and saving on heat and electricity as spring and summer come.

Hope any of my rambling helps.

It seems to me that we find problems before the techs. Not surprising as they do not operate 24/7.

Mike

Thanks for the time you took to let me know. I recall when The Great Migration took place -- I mostly kept quiet because I knew it would NOT be fun for anyone involved --and picked up on the funding problems then -- and like all projects, it took longer and was underfunded more than most thought it would be.

Didn't know a post could only be edited x number of times before it crashed and burned -- that explains some of the problem with communicating problems. When I had a real job, I rarely - if ever - checked WCG, or read my log. Now that I'm having issues with my ISP - Comcast Xfinity in a RURAL area I don't know if it's me, or them since recently it's been far more them than anything else - at least I don't yearn for big cities and paved roads!!! Only for speeds somewhere near what they say they deliver.

Thanks again -- not sure why anyone would leave completely - LOL - WHAT A LIE!!! - I was looking at the amount of computing time - and how it's timed, so would have very little effect if WCG went down other projects could fill that void but the frustration I now see can drive people crazy - MY frustration was FINDING IF there was a problem - now I know around where to look - so it's not a half hour, and if I can't find it in 5 min, then screw it - will presume it's them.

again, thanks for your time. L,p

Thanks -- now I know where to start looking - I used to do that, then it seemed that several years ago it all up and fragmented and I was lost again - looking here, poking there, peeking in around another corner of the digest -- Silly me! I thought I'd find the listing under 'official' notices and news. Don't follow on Facebook - though I may start - I loved it when I never had to check on anything - but when I retired, I was playing with super-fast chips and ram and cards. To see if tweaks were working I'd end up in the forums looking high and low and that was about the time of the migration - the WORST time possible to see if I could tweak the performance of my PC. Now I just check my graph and read my log and have a peak at what units are running -- and when I see a blank page with no obvious explanation in the forum -- I do the reload routine and let it 'repair' . Before I realized just how much trouble the Migration caused, I was even reloading the entire program from scratch, and of course that did nothing at all except kill some time that I didn't really want dead. Odd mindset Americans have - Kill it and start again, even if it didn't need killing in the first place. At least I could laugh and learn from my Self - thanks for pointing me in the right direction! Guess I'll go back to Boot and university where I can learn, again, exactly how to hurry up and wait. Thanks for your time!

THKS vm for these explanations above .As i am not a geek it is nice to have people who could state well the pbs and sometimes the possible answers.
Staying with WCG at mom and crunching MCM while waiting SCC to return.
Regards