How about this proposal? I've split it into two parts (core, i.e., the absolute minimum required to make it work, plus an options part which is the stuff which would make it useable and useful).

Title: RSS download of project news items into Manager (Development request/proposal).

Summary:

Download the news from the various projects, and Boinc itself, into the manager, so 'passive' users are kept up to date with the projects' news. This could be the basis for a client-project messaging system independent of email.



Core proposal:

* RSS download from the news feed of each project which that manager is attached to (whether actually actively processing or not), and also from the boinc project itself. Frequency of download = at same time as normal comms with project, or weekly if no comms has occurred with that project recently.

* Discard old news after some fixed interval (say, 6 months).

* New tab (between 'projects' and 'work') called 'News'. This tab will display the RSS news feed which has been downloaded. Ordered by date. This can be filtered by project if opened via the 'news' button, or unfiltered if selected directly. (The news would not be displayed in the messages tab, because the contents change too quickly and it's too technical for non-IT literate users).

* New button on Project tab called 'news' which changes focus to the news tab, and filters the display by the project highlighted when the news button was pressed.

* Projects tab - project line highlighted in some way if an important or critical news item has been received within the last (48?) hours. News button highlighted (perhaps colour change to red?). The intention is to guide more passive / less knowledgeable users to critical news.

* No preferences available to control the above behaviour (but see options below).

* Errors when downloading news are discarded, not displayed in the messages tab.



Options to make the above more useful (not core to proposal):


* Severity field on each news item (if not supplied, then 'normal'). Severity levels are 'routine', 'normal', 'important', 'critical'. For example, Rosetta 'days best match' posts would be 'routine', CPDN 'all workunits are restarting' would be critical.

* 'expire date' field in news item. If not present then use defaults. This would be useful if the news item was specific to a date (i.e., servers down on Wednesday would expire on Thursday)

* 'Read/unread' flag in items already downloaded. Indicated visually in some way (bold/unbold etc). Taken into account on the project highlighting / news button highlighting mentioned above.

* More flexible news expiry, perhaps based on severity indicator in combination with expiry date.

* Targetted push - allow project administrators to send items to groups of specified UserIDs (note, not hostIDs) which do not otherwise appear in the news feed. (This would be of useful only if email was not practical for some reason). An example of this could be 'Invitation to closed beta test' targetted towards established users who have active machines with 1GB ram or above.

* Options to configure the amount and severity of news downloaded (i.e., download only 'important' or 'critical' items). Option stored locally to manager, *or* in the project preferences.

* Options to control which projects's news is downloaded (stored locally to manager *or* in the project preferences).

Since users with multiple computers would usually only be interested in a single feed ...

Thyme:
That's easy enough to do. Users with multiple host can set their general preferences set to supress the feed and then use the global_preferences_override.xml file to enable it on the system(s) they want to see the feed on.

* Options to control frequency of download. (stored locally to manager *or* in the project preferences).

* Search for news items on a subject on the server which would not normally be downloaded. This could be used for FAQ items (for example, error codes), possibly this could even be context based (i.e., clicking on exit codes in the messages tab could download the appropriate FAQ item from that project). This would effectively be a project-specific help system.

arnaud25: Another possibility while thinking about this is to wonder if there could be some mechanism for finding out what a particular message means to a particular project. A button for 'Find out what this means' becoming active when a message is selected which if pressed contacts the project concerned to see if they have more detailed information.

Each project would then have to set up some information source that could be updated (preferable by moderators etc.) So for CPDN the 'you may need to reset' message could be set up to provide more information like 'This is harmless, you do NOT need to reset'. If nothing had been set up it would just say no further information available.

Comments (pros and cons)

The development is intended to keep the more passive users in a project up to date with anything important happening. A good example of this is the BBC/CCE project - the majority of users are non-IT literate, and unfamiliar with Boinc. The benefit to the Boinc projects as a whole would be increased retention of this class of users, and hopefully they would develop over time into more active, IT literate users.

Secondly, users who became involved with a project but subsequently moved away from it (due either to the project being inactive for a period, or because of platform issues), can be brought back by means of announcements of the project being reactivated, new project code for their platform, etc.

The development areas are primarily on the Manager, since the infrastructure already exists on the backend. Since RSS readers are now fairly standard, and use the same sorts of technology which the Manager already uses (i.e., XML, ) it should be a comparatively low impact development, particularly if an open source RSS reader can be used.

Downsides are:
* Could add network traffic to the server
* Less useful for knowledgeable users or projects which consist primarily of knowledgeable users (such as SETI)

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Even as an IT savvy, long time participant I would find this useful. During the recent CPDN reset, I saw the model failed and started to restore from backup before checking the CPDN site. This news tab would have saved me the trouble.

Three suggestions:
All news items should be short and to the point - 256 char max. A hyperlink would lead the user back to the main site for more detail, if necessary.

Very passive users may leave BOINC minimized for long periods. Critical messages may cause the BOINC icon to flash in the systray.

Automatic BableFish translation for non-English speakers?