Free-DC has updated too. Makes a mess of my credit graphs, but at least I got my 100K milestone. Don't think I'll be rushing to push this project up to the 250K milestone though unless the credit updates become more frequent.

Cheers,

Al.

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Les and others may be blind to the power of credits. Credits will bring more contribution to your project than scolding people on the merits of doing it for the science. Nobody is asking you to agree. The numbers don't lie. Large contributors bounce projects and push challenges quite a bit not caring about the science. I do care about some of the sciences but what keeps it fun and interesting are two things.

1. Results that are published and explained for the common man to see.

2. Thrill of the competition as you work your way up the ranks.

If you do neither of these, people will drop the project like a bad habit. Every project has some crusader that claims points don't matter. Apparently they do because they are a big influence on where resources go by the masses and more importantly the big hitters. I personally don't care what points you dish out. Just make them fair to everyone at your project and have fun with it. Just don't disregard it because you could care less. They push a great deal more than you would care to give credit to. Denying this is ignorance.

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1. Results that are published and explained for the common man to see.

Extensive discussion about one of the recent models
here

And that helps keep it interesting. However, that only appeals to part of the general support you get.

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A lot of people here seem to think that moderators work for Oxford Uni. We don't. We're just ordinary crunchers who have taken an interest in the project from the start. When some unpleasant posts were made "way back", several of us were made moderators. All this means, is that we can hide posts, and move them to other threads. This saves the real Oxford people from having to do this.
The other "function" of moderators is to pass on messages to the project people, about issues that they need to know about.

As for not being interested in credits, that's just rubbish. I've only been pointing out the obvious: that the 2 project people "have their noses in their work" all day. And that's just another English saying, for those people whose first language isn't English.

As for what the 2 project people have been doing:
Jonathan has been upgrading the beta test server to the latest BOINC code, after the crash of a few weeks back,
and Andy has been readying some new types of models for testing.

Or is everyone one here too obsessed with credits from previous work done, to care about getting any new work?

I've said several times in this thread that we were constantly talking to the project people about fixing the credit problems, and I also said that the situation might be about to change.
But did anyone listen? No, posts just started getting vitriolic.

And as it's NOT a function of moderators to try to help people having problems with their crunching, I won't be around very much in the future.

I've said several times in this thread that we were constantly talking to the project people about fixing the credit problems, and I also said that the situation might be about to change.
But did anyone listen? No, posts just started getting vitriolic.

Actually, most of us have read it. We have also read how it isn't a priority. We have also read the statement that said

Anyway, something may happen soon.

which also means that something may not happen soon. I don't see anything recent stating that they are directly working to resolve the issue. I'm glad they are working on the other issues, but to ignore one of the big draws to a project and to give the same lame excuses many other people use about it is all about the science is again...plain and simple ignorance.

Am I here for the science? Maybe 6 years ago. Now, it is because of my own personal goals and challenges my team is a part of. I got tired of all the headaches that came with the project and have cut back a bunch. Would you be sad to see me go? I doubt you would notice the blip. Does the project need my resources? At this time probably not since they have had recent issues with limited work. Does this mean they should ignore our concerns? I guess this just depends on what kind of reputation they want their project to have amongst the community.

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but to ignore one of the big draws to a project and to give the same lame excuses many other people use about it is all about the science is again...plain and simple ignorance.

I completely disagree. The project has a scientific goal. Given the limited work available, I would completely support the getting more work units ready to send out being given a higher priority than even the sites on the CPDN site, never mind external sites. If there were a shortage of people wanting to crunch for the project then your arguments might have some validity. As it is, in my book they don't.

..... Does this mean they should ignore our concerns? I guess this just depends on what kind of reputation they want their project to have amongst the community.

And at this point in the conversation, you need to stop and clarify 'which community?'.

I don't know if you, personally, have ever held a management or technical role in a team (of two people) where scientific researchers on four continents are looking to you, personally, to provide answers quickly and reliably enough to convince politicians on all seven continents (plus the United Nations) that they need to take very expensive and unpopular action now.

No? Me neither. But I have been solo programmer for a small team operating at a national level (UK), and I have had sole responsibility for a small telesales business that would have started to lose money in seconds, and gone bust in weeks, if my technical infrastructure had broken, and I couldn't have fixed it, at any time of day, seven days a week.

So I have a small degree of insight into what these guys are doing, how they make their decisions, and what gets attention first. And top priority is the wording at the top of this very page: "The world's largest climate forecasting experiment for the 21st. century".

If you want to be part of that, you are most welcome. But the climate research comes first. Other features of the distributed computing ecosystem, like credits and badges and teams and competition, are purely a secondary means to an end. Just at the moment, I suspect the priority order is

1) Climate
2) sleep
3) all the frilly bits round the edges

Sorry to be blunt, but "my own personal goals and challenges my team is a part of" don't feature on that list except as part of (3), and the feelings of one (out of 15,000 active volunteers) - no matter how eloquently expressed - is unlikely to change that.

Thanks Richard, you put it much more clearly than I managed.

Hello everyone,

I am the system administrator for CPDN, and it is my role to fix issues such as the one with which this thread is concerned.

I am aware that many of you have concerns about the lack of credit exports to sites such as http://boincstats.com/en/stats/2/project/detail

I have looked into this, and I think it is now fixed, which can be verified at the link above.

Those of you that follow the project closely probably know that we are in the process of improving the computing infrastructure behind CPDN. This involves moving our services to new servers and providing a new mechanism for the project scientists to release and process the work that our volunteers do for us.
This has coincided with two high-profile experiments, the UK Floods and Australian heatwave experiments, which have been occupying the time of the computing team (there are indeed only 2 of us).

I admit that I have considered the credit aggregator issue to be low priority until now, because we have been working on these other issues. I hope that soon you will all be able to see the results of the work that we have undertaken.

...but for now, at least this one issue has been fixed :-)






Jonathan Miller
CPDN System-Administrator

And at this point in the conversation, you need to stop and clarify 'which community?'.

I don't believe I do need to clarify. I think it applies to all communities. Here and the BOINC world in general. This community isn't really unique in any way.

Don't apologize for being blunt. It gets the point across better if you do. You have said nothing that isn't repeated by every crusader at every project. I agree the science is the main concern. However, I don't for one second believe the project would have all of the resources it has had without the credit system. It draws people here for several various reasons. Cut that out and your science takes even longer. I'm just one of the 15,000 that just happened to have spoken up here. Not just one that has these feelings. I think it is important to point that out since you are using it as an influence tool here.

We aren't talking about a minor irritation that recently sprung up. We are talking about a fixable issue that has gone on for several months. A day or two away from "working on the science" isn't going to be all that much different in the science's outcome.

Edit: Jonathan, thank you for taking the time to address our concerns.

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And at this point in the conversation, you need to stop and clarify 'which community?'.

I don't believe I do need to clarify. I think it applies to all communities. Here and the BOINC world in general. This community isn't really unique in any way.

Perhaps I should clarify - I think I lost my train of thought somewhere along the way, and never came back to give my own definition of the two communities I was thinking of!

They were, of course, the distinct (but equally important) communities of

* scientists and researchers
* volunteers and crunchers

Both are needed, but the focus swings from one to the other as needs and circumstances change over time.

Jonathan has passed on the technical details of what has been done to make the stats available again (over the internal channel Les mentioned). I can pick it up from there, and let the other aggregation sites know where to look - I hope all the team stats analysts are subscribed to the right mailing list. But please allow 48/72 hours for statisticians to update their scripts, before every stats site is up to date. Any left behind after that, we can address individually.

I see that it is believed the data exports issue of the past three monehts has been resolved. I say 'it is believed' as neither of the two sites I typically use reflects an update as of today:

http://www.boincsynergy.com/stats/index.php

http://boinc.netsoft-online.com/e107_plugins/boinc/bp.php?project=4

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It doesn't seem to be fixed. Yesterday Boincstats showed new credits after 54 days. Today no new credits, so it seems to be broken after one day.

I see that it is believed the data exports issue of the past three monehts has been resolved. I say 'it is believed' as neither of the two sites I typically use reflects an update as of today:

http://www.boincsynergy.com/stats/index.php

http://boinc.netsoft-online.com/e107_plugins/boinc/bp.php?project=4

My notification of the new download location was circulated to all subscribers of the statistics mailing list at almost exactly 16:00 UTC today.

"BOINCstats Willy" acknowledged it with thanks within the hour, but not all analysts live and work in the European time zone - and some of them have an Ascension Day holiday today. Even once the collection scripts have been updated, there's almost 100 MB of (highly compressed) data for each site to download and process in their database backends - before any figures appear on your screen.

I will be watching boinc.netsoft-online.com particularly closely, because they provide the "below the line" cross-project numbers on our account home pages here. I believe they live at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so they should still be up - but their server usually only updates once per 24 hours.

Alex Plantema wrote:

It doesn't seem to be fixed. Yesterday Boincstats showed new credits after 54 days. Today no new credits, so it seems to be broken after one day.

I have gotten a credit bump at BOINCstats today. It wasn't in the daily update at 16:39 GMT, but in the incremental at 19:36 GMT.

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Has the credit update script stopped working again?

Has the credit update script stopped working again?

Hmmm.

The files in http://www.climateprediction.net/stats/ are dated 3 June, and the internal timestamp on the tables is Mon, 02 Jun 2014 16:19:21 GMT.

So I'd say yes.

Thanks for the confirmation Richard.
Not terribly important to me, so I guess we just wait again until it gets restored.