melter65 wrote:What about contacting present team members with low, or zero, RAC and give them a gentle nudge to get them crunching again?
Hi,
Thanks for the ideas.
OK - deep breath time....!!
Direct email has been tried in the past.....in fact, before the forum existed, I sporadically would trawl the (admittedly back then, limited number of) projects, collate all the different email addresses of team members, then weed out all the duplicates and then send out a blanket email to all and sundry.
But once the email list got to around 1,000, it became apparent that:
1) It took a long time to cut and paste, collate and then remove duplicates from all the email addys collected
2) It took quite a while to cut and paste all the email addy's into maybe 40 or so emails (coz some ISP's frowned if a single email is BCC'd to more than say 25 email addys)
3) The response from said emails was limited - maybe 10% might respond.
4) Indeed, some people didn't like being sent emails about UBT and subsequently unsubscribed themselves (although they kept on crunching for UBT), which made it more difficult to collate the email addys together.
Some time ago, I proposed to Dr David Anderson, that they allow team founders the ability to send team members an email via the project....to some degree, this has been allowed, but BOINC haven't made it easy. By contrast, WCG do allow this....!!
And of course, in the last 2 years, there's been a huge increase in the number of projects, making direct email even more tricky to administrate.
Hence why, when a few others suggested getting a forum together - so we got a Yahoo group set up, which was successful, and which then provided the impetus to create this forum (with grateful thanks to Darren).
Fact is: Anyone who joins the Team on any project, would, one assumes visit the Team website and hence find the forum.
So, if they wanted to be pro-active, one would assume that they would have a presence here already, even if they were only "guests"...
melter65 wrote:Another thing to think about, and this is in no way a dig at you Timbo, is the membership list. For example, I always look at the profiles of members who's birthdays appear at the bottom of the main page. If they have never posted I don't bother leaving a message as they are very unlikely to read it! I went as far as doing a search on boinc stats for one person as I'd never heard of them and it appears they now crunch for a different team. Is the team membership list separate from the forum membership list, or do you automatically become a 'team member' when you join the forum?
OK - just to clear things up:
1) If you crunch on a project and subsequently join UBT, then you are, by definition, a Team member. As such, your crunching stats are helping the team.
2) If you then join the forum, AND you have generated some credits for the team, then you are granted access to all parts of the forum.
If you just join the forum (but don't generate credits for UBT), then you see the same sections of the forum, as though you were a guest - the only difference being that "forum members" can post to any forum section they can access.
The two "membership lists" are of course, entirely separate. And this is the fundamental problem - how to "merge" the data from multiple BOINC projects along with the forum data, into a simple "messaging service" that won't be blocked by ISP's or be regarded as "spam".
On the credits side:
There are forum members who don't generate credits for UBT - that's mainly because they are members of other teams....which is fine because a forum needs to be "open" just to generate plenty of interest.
There are team members who join the team for a while and then decide to stop crunching. This is what happens to probably 50+% of people - they find maybe that BOINC takes up too much of their CPU resources (although that situation is improving with many PC's now sporting multiple CPU's and hardware/memory prices coming down).
Or they just try it, and give up for other reasons - fortunately, BOINC is now very stable (compared to 4 years ago) and hence for many people it just sits in their Taskbar and gets on with it with little or no need for interaction (once you've joined a project, that is).
I tried for some time, to get PCPro (magazine) to include BOINC software on the mag freebie CDROM as a regular item - but as it wasn't "newsworthy", they decided not to include it....
Likewise, Dr David Anderson has never provided the "UK BOINC Team" version of BOINC software - this would have been a customised version, with maybe 5 different flavours (science, medical, maths, biology, misc) which enabled people to install BOINC and ALL the specific projects from the categories, with just one username and password (and of course automatically "joined" to "UBT".....
So, in a long winded, drawn out way, this is the situation.
Ideally, BOINC project software should allow team founders" to produce (say) team newsletters, that team members can "subscribe" to....but until then, I think the best way is to generate interest in the team website and the forum.
melter65 wrote:I just wondered how many forum or team members we have that don't actually give any credits to the team at all?
On the projects side, it's easy to see who have generated credits and how many team members there are - just visit the team page on each project. In general, we have a very good take up rate of people who join a project AND then generate some credits. However, as you may realise now, the number of "active" members, compared to total membership is running at about 40+% (say 750 out of 1860).
However, I took a conscious decision a long time ago, NOT to delete someone who had joined a project as a team member, just because they hadn't generated ANY credits on THAT project - coz for all I know, they might be crunching for UBT on another project....:thumbup:
regards
Tim