There are a number of reasons why Volunteers give up their time, machines and pay high electricity prices in order to support your project. Some project managers spend a lot of time in maintaining the project and communicating with their user database. Unfortunately, there are some who do not appear to care about their users and fail to advise them of what is going on.

The purpose of the thread is to appeal to those project managers that do not make good use of the provided "NEWS" option in the BOINC project software to keep the user base up to date of project developments. Short items could be posted here of impending Downtime's necessary for maintenance, Work Unit issues like impending shortage due to implementation of new ones or cessation of issue of WU's due to some reason. The positive of using this method of Communication is that users can make good use of the RSS feed option and be warned to adjust their machines accordingly, rather than be idle and just give money to the Power Companies. It is understood that some Project have not updated their software for some time for a variety of reasons. It is also known that some projects have altered the software for their own needs and use of this feature might not be available or incompatible. If that is the case, than please consider alternative methods of communicating. For example there is the option to use the "Notices" whereby users get notified by the provided option in the BOINC Software they are using. Failing that, there is also the option to write a short email of impending issues to either the Official BOINC Forum or BOINCStats. Consider that information of a general nature posted in your Message Board might be hidden and gets lost amongst a multitude of other issues that is written in a Message Board and is time consuming to read all the posts of all projects.

Whilst I can not speak for anybody else, I can say this. The cost of Electricity is going up and up and it is not sustainable any longer to just set and forget a number of projects. One need to choose carefully which project you wish to follow and why. Obviously, if the Project Managers do not spend much time in talking to their user database and keeping them current as to what is going on in their project than they are likely to loose support from me and other like minded users. I appeal that you review the amount of time and method you use to communicate with your users. I might even be blunt..If you have no time to talk to us than you do not deserve our support.

If you have no time to talk to us than you do not deserve our support.

I agree with this completely. Volunteers are spending significant amounts of money on electricity and hardware, as well as their time configuring projects and making sure their crunching farms are operating smoothly. I've always found it disrespectful that many project managers can't seem to be bothered to take even a few minutes here and there to keep their volunteers posted.

I don't have a huge crunching farm like you do, Cruncher Pete, and my total output is a drop in the bucket in comparison, so my voice might not count for much in this regard, but I'm hoping they'll listen to you given how much work you're doing...

The purpose of the thread is to appeal to those project managers that do not make good use of the provided "NEWS" option in the BOINC project software to keep the user base up to date of project developments.

If it concerns you, why aren't you contacting the project admins instead of posting it on the BOINC boards? You presume project admins are monitoring the forums here. Some do, but not all and they shouldn't be expected to be monitoring these forums.

If it concerns you, why aren't you contacting the project admins instead of posting it on the BOINC boards? You presume project admins are monitoring the forums here. Some do, but not all and they shouldn't be expected to be monitoring these forums.

I have done so more than 6 weeks ago. It is simple realy, if they do not wish to tell me what is going on I just crunch another project. The only reason I posted it here is for users to be aware that someone cares and as you said some project admins might even read it here for a lot of them are also crunchers.

Keep on crunching and have a nice day...

Are you looking for some good projects, or just making a general statement? I can always recommend BURP if you're willing to crunch for non-scientific projects; it's always in need of new crunchers and always seems to get overlooked. Work is not always consistent, it's dependent on user-submitted rendering sessions, but Janus has always been a responsive and hospitable admin.

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