Is there any means of viewing the General Preferences of another BOINC user?? It would be extremely helpful in trying to assist other users if we could view their preference settings.

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Ask them to copy their settings for you (copy the whole page, paste in a post or email). Otherwise, no, there isn't any way to see them.

Thing is, if you can see those, you can see all his other data as well and perhaps change it.

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I guess my point is that I'd like to request that such a function be available via the web interfaces. Presumably each specific project would have to enable this for it to work. Perhaps a link from the user profile page of the project that would go retrieve the user's General Preferences... project preferences would be nice to see too. To alter them I'd need the user's password or account key. I just want to view them.

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But why? What's wrong with asking them to copy&paste it? I don't necessarily need everyone to know what my general preferences are.

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It is just going to be spamming of other users. If you need the preferences from another user, just ask them. If you don't know the user, you don't really have the right to see the (rather) personal data of another user.

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Clearly I am being misunderstood here. None of the information I wish to see is personal, nor can it lead to any spamming. I just want to see the basic general preferences, % of memory to use while idle, % of CPU to use, % of disk allowed, do work while computer in use, whether the person has multiple locations configured... THAT stuff.

...and if you didn't wish others to be able to see that, well the ability to view the preferences could be controlled by whether your computers are hidden or not. And only show the preference info. if they are not hidden.

The problems with asking users to copy the information are numerous....

The reason I want the info. is to assist new users in setting things up and getting BOINC running. As new users, they don't necessarily KNOW how to view it, and aren't necessarily adept at using the msg boards to post the response. And to document all of that detail on every reply requesting the information would really be a pain. Asking users to go read about how to get the info. does not work well either. I think by now we realize that people don't read.

With that being the ONLY means of obtaining such basic information, you are adding about a day longer to that user getting their question answered. And that's assuming they are able to figure out how to post the info.

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Which is why if I ask for that information, I give out a step by step manual on how to do it. If you really want to help someone, you have patience with him or her. So you explain how that user can get to that inforation, including links to the home.php site and the general preferences.

Or you ask them to open the global_prefs.xml file and copy the information from that to a post window. It's all in explaining how to do things.

If you want me to, I'll add such a How To in to my FAQs. Then you can use that as a guideline to ask people that information.

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My point is simply that no series of steps, regardless of how easy or how documented and how widely known... is going to make BOINC seem easier to use. If we make it easy to access such information, then responders (including the Skype team) can speak with confidence about how the user's settings are causing the behavior the user is observing. Or, if you prefer the wording, how the user might modify their settings to better suite BOINC to the environment of their machine.

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Asking the user to give you his preferences would also teach him where they are. The more they learn the better.

i'm with feet1st on this - being able to view a user's settings would be very useful in quite a few cases, and would allow much speedier resolution of many problems. It'd need to be done through a voluntary 'allow xxxx [drop-down] to view [read-only] my settings for x days'.

It could be done very clearly and would be beneficial to the BOINC projects without otherwise reducing a user's privacy, and would then only give very limited info.

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I don't really think it would help that much to see the web settings with the introduction V5.8.x and especially V5.9 +. Since the users will easily be able to change the preferences locally, we can no longer assume anything about the settings on the web. If a setting is available, you can bet it will be changed locally either accidentally or on purpose. People love to mess around with settings whether they understand them or not. If the information is needed to diagnose a problem we will always have to ask to see what's in the global_prefs and global_prefs_override files for the problem computer. I think that any other approach will lead the troubleshooter down the wrong path.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470