Good news! Hopefully we will all be able to help with the further development of the grid.

This is a great idea. I'm glad to see you guys taking positive steps to improve the fielding of new projects in the wake of the HPF2 launch.

Hopefully this will restrict the need to deal with bad project behavior to those willing and able to do so. No more "I've been doing the same work unit for 2 weeks, is that bad?" messages. I hate to think how many machines are still even now stuck in infinite loops because they aren't monitored.

Are there any particular requirements, expectations, or responsibilities for beta testers? Should we be prepared to give detailed reports for any strange behavior we see, or should we assume that you're already closely monitoring any WU that's issued to the beta group?

I would at least suggest that only users who watch their systems somewhat closely should beta test. Beta WUs will by definition cause occasional problems like hangs or even crashes, and if you've got 10 systems spread all over that you hardly ever look at, you'll be risking unnoticed downtime.

I see that it's set up to let you use the device profiles to selectively do beta testing on some of your systems and not others. Make sure to use that to only test on systems you routinely watch. And don't beta test on production systems doing important work, or (especially) on other user's systems that you may have Borged into your collective.

I expect these beta WUs will often come from earlier in the project debugging cycle than we've seen before, so they'll probably be even less stable than the recent bad HPF2 units. People should know what they're getting into and be ready to cope with it.

But anyway, great work by the grid techs. This should go a long way towards smoothing future operations.

Hi Sekerob

Check this link:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/...d=8009&offset=0#65714

Please give the beta WUs names that distinguish them from normal WUs. That way if I suddenly get 5 errors on WUs then I won't have to come here and ask "Are these a beta test units or should I look for a problem on my computer?".

Anonymous could mean anything including disguised with names that look like HPF2, FAAH or HDC names.

So, WCG techs, will the names immediately and unambiguously identfy beta WUs as beta WUs?