BOINCStats changes
Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 9:06 pm
This was posted on the site last week but I only just remembered about it today when I realised that my position had jumped from around 85 to 35 and we had, apparantly, lost over 500 members.
http://www.boincstats.com/forum/forum_t ... hp?id=1237
I suspect that the vast majority of the 500 won't be bothered anyway (they've tried it then deleted, forgot, too much hassle, not bothered, can't be bothered etc..) and it also seems that 'The Masters' emails haven't persuaded them either!
I just noticed that in another UK team, membership has dropped to 6! Can't remember how many they had before but I think ours losses are minimal compared to theirs!
http://www.boincstats.com/forum/forum_t ... hp?id=1237
If I read it right, it seems that most of our members are members of UKBOINC team and at least 1 other team. It makes no difference to the overall total but, I think, it'll be a bit disconcerting when these members don't see their stats on our page and might assume that they've been booted!To start off, an example of the stat this thread is about is here.
Up until now creating the BOINC combined users-in-team-stats used a pretty simple rule: Take the Team-ID of the team in every single project, and match it against the user’s team-member-id in every project..
There are two problems with this approach:
1: If a user is a member of different teams in different projects, the user shows up in all teams it participates in, with all his/hers credit.
2: It is taking a very long time to build these stats when they are requested, as the query for the database is very inefficient (for the DB guru’s: yes, indexes are used).
Another fact:
3: If a user moves from team 1 to team 2, his credit won’t transfer with him. His newly granted credit will go to the new team, old credit stays with the team(s) he was a member of before. This makes team stats not 100% accurate to start with, even in single projects! (Yes, I know some projects do transfer all the credit to the new team, but this isn’t in the BOINC guidelines.)
This means, a team can have a user with 1.000.000 credits, firmly at rank 1 in the stats, and the team itself only has 75.000 credits.
There is no way to get the credit the user has contributed to his current team. This isn’t stored by the projects, and it isn’t in the XML export.
1 + 3 makes the users-in-team-stats inaccurate. They are nice to look at, and provide in-team competition, but still inaccurate.
Now, back on topic: changing the BOINC combined users-in-team-stats.
I intend to allow a BOINC combined user to be a member of only one team.
How to determine the team? The projects are updated in order of the time they were added to BOINCstats (so SETI updates before Rosetta). Info needed for the combined stats is added to these stats in the same order. The last project in which the user has an account that updates will write the Team-ID to the combined table. The projects following won’t touch that.
This will solve 1 + 2, but not 3.
It is up to you (the user) to get yourself into the users-in-team-stats of your choice. If you decide to be a member of multiple teams, you won’t be shown in all of them in the combined stats anymore.
I will make the necessary database changes this weekend, so expect the changes to be online by Monday.
I suspect that the vast majority of the 500 won't be bothered anyway (they've tried it then deleted, forgot, too much hassle, not bothered, can't be bothered etc..) and it also seems that 'The Masters' emails haven't persuaded them either!
I just noticed that in another UK team, membership has dropped to 6! Can't remember how many they had before but I think ours losses are minimal compared to theirs!