GopherBoy said
As a newcomber to this debate I understand that some unusual results appeared regarding WATE's account which obviously would be a cause to question if they've become that noticable.
What was done with Wate's account was very noticeable indeed. Here is my original post copied from cpdn news. The trojan attached more than 5000 computers to Wate's account:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=1571
I'd like to add my point of view and agree that regardless of who was responsible of the actions of WATE's account, that the account be suspended/checked and/or revoked.
This was done within a week by all the affected projects except Predictor. Predictor acted after the furore erupted on its forum a month later and after private communications urging action from a number of people.
And when questioned through the Predictor forums it sparked a whole chain of events, mainly banning of accounts and users and deleting of credits.
Most posters on the Predictor forum assumed that the Predictor admins had known about Wate since mid-February, when Sänger copied my announcement to its forum, and that they had decided to take no action. Many therefore reacted angrily and in some cases rudely.
In fact, Predictor appear not to have accepted the veracity of the original notification from Boinc admin in Berkeley, and to have ignored Sänger's post quoting the announcement. The Predictor admins in their ignorance had no idea what had hit them and reacted most unreasonably.
However, the Wate affair is only one episode in a long history at Predictor of the admins ignoring posters and crunchers. See, for example, the reponse committed cruncher Conan's query received:
http://predictor.scripps.edu/forum_thread.php?id=2499
or Barry last week
http://predictor.scripps.edu/forum_thread.php?id=2618
or Pooh Bear's request over a year ago - he is one of boinc's most assiduous and long-serving helpers
http://predictor.scripps.edu/forum_thread.php?id=2307
Another post over a year ago started
KNOCK KNOCK! ANYBODY THERE?.
It has been suggested to the Predictor admins both privately and on the forum that they should take on some outside moderators to remedy this lamentable situation. Predictor (or Scripps?) have decided against this.
I also agree to, what seems to be, unfair banning and supension of other account users who have simply voiced concerns on Predictors forums. (I would agree if any posting were pointlessly insulting/abusive,etc. Concerns should atleast be atleast politeful at first and maybe stonger worded if not addressed)
While some of the banned members had probably been rude, others appear not to have been. In addition, instead of the Predictor admins following the normal boinc project procedure for non-spammers (deletion of post with reasons, warning, then short ban, warning, then longer ban, warning, then permanent ban, with reasons given in public or private at every stage), they went straight to 31-year bans with deletion of acounts. All the while, spammers' posts were left untouched and are still there.
After the whole Predictor forum was massively spammed 42 days ago (results still visible
here , the admins took action against the entire BFL team, banning all who were not yet banned and annulling all their credits. As far as I know, such action is unprecedented on any boinc project. The following day this was the news on the Predictor website's front page:
Due to recent attacks on the Predictor@Home forums by a small group of malicious hackers we have enabled some restrictions in the forums. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause our volunteers. As so often is the case a few bad apples can spoil the lot and their behavior has forced us to enforce policies we would prefer not to. The accounts used by the attackers have been deleted. Despite these issues, which we will weather, we continue to value your efforts and the resources you volunteer toward the scientific objectives of the Predictor@Home project.
I'm sure I don't need to expand on the view of human nature and relationships suggested by the phrase 'a few bad apples can spoil the lot'.
I find the actions of Predictor's forum admin staff to be very poor in handling this situation and it seems a good idea to contact Scripps for further advice and support with this whole mess.
I (and I believe others too) have contacted the Scripps Institute but received no response. My last email to the Predictor admins received no response either.
I just hope someone at Scripps will investigate this further. If a consumer or client is unhappy with a service and complains, the service provider should always look into any complaint even if the complaint has or has not any foundation because the bad PR it can create is not desirable for any company or business. (A simple rule followed by almost any high street store or any other company)
More is the case with such projects that use BOINC for it is us users who provide the time/effort and kindly volunteered out of their own kindness to help such projects, free of charge (a company with such computational power such as the combined users on BOINC would be able to charge a large fortune), our only reward being credits, a simple number on the internet with no real value.
My home PC cost me £500+ GPB and runs BOINC 24/7 (at my expense), I would be a little cheesed if Predictor (or any other project) blocked my account and erased my credits without any explantation. Hence I would like to stand by the people who would be interested some kind of explanation to what has happend and still is happening at Predictor.
Thanks for reading,
Gopherboy
I thoroughly agree. If the carefully-prepared and restrained email does not receive a satisfactory and reasoned response from Predictor or the Scripps Institute within a couple of weeks, I would suggest that the teams could then copy it to some of the Scripps Institute trustees. Two of them are, for example, UK academics who might be more concerned about the wider damage to the reputation of the Scripps Institute.