Please consider debating my suggestion that this project should be removed for BOINCStats.

Bradley Dice the Volunteer Moderator, Project Administrator, Project Developer, Project tester, Project Scientist for BMGathome has not answeed any questions, solved any problems that has been posted to him in their Forum since March 1. I beleive that if any person is interested and thankfull for the help provided by volunteers should communicate with those volunteers in their own forum unless something prevented them from doing so. Bradly failed to do that in six weeks to various questions and problems that was pointed out to him. It is possible that he does not reply because he can not do so, like he might even be dead. Apart from that I can not see any reason why he does not say something to his volunteers or answers PM's.

I have removed him from the list of known BOINC projects from the BOINC Wicki, I now I ask to consider removing the project from stats sites to save time for users that will not get good results for crunching this project. At best I would suggest you boycott it and follow another science project. This statement is in despite that I am number two in the project.

I agree this project and it's so-called administrator should be removed from anything and everything BOINC.

If you look at the projects message board/forums it is obvious that there is NO COMMUNICATION from "Bradley Dice" or anyone supposedly associated with with it.

I gave up after the first week crunching for the project when tasks ran about 10 times longer than what the original estimated run-times were.

While I can agree to boycott the project (I do anyway somehow since I've reached a certain private goal long ago before the problems there started), I have to disagree on taking it out from the stats. There were a lot of uncommunicative admins recently, OProject, Beal and BealF foremost to mention, but none of these projects were removed just because of that. Also there was a lot of trouble with Predictor years ago, which was from my POV the biggest affair in the entire BOINC history until now, yet the stats of it are also still here.
It would be an exaggerated measure to remove a project from a stats site just because an admin is not responsive. And I think it would be more community-harmful to all those who made some points there than to "punish" the admin. With that it would be a big kind of "censorship" to BOINC itself and I don't want to know what the consequences would be...

Btw: if you really start with one, you can continue with all the others: as mentioned OProject, Beal, BealF & Predictor, then Gridcoin Finance (the mess I discovered there is more worse than BMG in my eyes), CSG (admin Travis has not responded for over a month now to posts and wasn't very productive in the last months also) and I don't know how much else because these are the ones I know of and visited recently. Over time there wouldn't be much projects left here probably...

Amen...

Perhaps the project should be retired, rather than removed?

Dudes. This project exists. It is running. It is updating its XMLs for stats sites. It is granting some credit every day, even if to a few lucky people with no problems or don't care about those problems. So, some people are running it and getting credit, and the stats sites simply reflect that progress. That means, this project is a valid project for people to connect to and for stats sites to report on. Period.

Yes, it has problems. It has many problems. It has huge problems. The admin seemed like a nice guy, he addressed bunch of problems early on, was always courteous, but now he doesn't respond in some suspicious manner. And, that pisses you off in some visceral way.

But why would you want to use that emotion and take it to a stats site and official lists to turn it into a huge issue, rally everyone in your quest, have others support you in your frustration of that project, and ultimately boycott and squash it? As said previously, it is not like this is the first nor the last project where there are problems and the admins are non-responsive. I personally have questions in at least half a dozen forums that went unanswered by the admins...

As a BOINC user, we always had ways to deal with that, right? You don't add it to your hosts to churn for. Or, you say No New Tasks. Or, you can post to its forums and hope new comers will see your post and move away. Or, you warn people on stats site forums like here, that there are huge problems with that project. Or, you just churn for "Production" only projects and avoid any headache (well, most of it, anyways) such that projects like this is never on your radar.

But, if you choose to churn for all projects as soon as they see the light of the day, the way I do, well, then you accept to suffer intermittently. And, my suffering is nobody's business but mine. It is not Willy's, it is not Bok's, it is not some other stat site admin's, it is not some other fellow I-am-gonna-churn-for-every-project-churner's. I am old and mature enough to just disconnect or NNT that project on my hosts, watch its forums for any update on problems, and make a decision if & when I want to go back or not.

Needless to say, that is what I did.

Thanks for listening
Tuna

PS: Pete, by the way, by "you", I don't mean YOU, but in the sense of the generic ONE. Funny how English works that way... Sorry if reading it until this edit made you feel attacked. I am not.

I am now going to sit on the fence and watch the battle. I have achieved my aim and that is to create an interest in the overall issue of when are we going to call a project retired and when is a project considered active. Personally, I just can't understand why some projects treat us as cannon fodder. It costs us a lot of money for our equipment and to run them, it costs us time to research the project and consider it in the first place weather it is worthwhile to support it or not. Yes, we do have a choice and if we do not like it just hit the option button and remove the project from my computer.

I maintain that those Admins who do not value our support and input should be chasticed and they do not deserve to be supported. The question is at what stage do we consider that enough is enough. If you act unilaterally and just detach the project from your list, it will take a long time before the Admin realizes that he has no supporters left because for every detach there will be an uninformed newbie who will join for we advocate that this is an ACTIVE project. I am even considering having a "Name and Shame Forum" where we can discuss these issues to warn prospective users of these forums not to waste their time. In the case of Bradley at BMG, I did say that for all we know, he could be dead. It only takes a few minutes to send a text message to one of the users if he can't access his own forum to tell us the current situation. Disregarding us for for over six weeks is not good enough. And that goes to any other Admin that is happening to read this. You either want us to help you or if not than tell us and close your project, we would understand and go elsewhere, but do not waste my time like this...

For those of you who think this is too hard a punishment, all I can say is fair enough, you are entitled to your point of view and I am not offended by it. In fact it ads value to the debate from which others can make up their own mind. BTW, please note that I started this thread to debate and did not say I WANT this project removed, although that is one of the options if in deed it continues to be inactive. The fact that it is issuing some credit to some whilst others can not get a WU or can't get credit for work submitted is not a good sign for there is something wrong and there is no body home. Forget the PM, answeres are needed to be provided in theit forum for answers to some questions have not been answered for months. (See my own questions there)If you are a the only Volunteer Moderator, Project Administrator, Project Scientist, Project Developer, Project Tester (as is denoted under Bradleys name) and have no time to talk to your volunteers, than please do not waste our time and just close the project. And that is my personal message to all project Admins not just BMG. The BOINC Developers have the right idea. Projects need to proove themselves before they are acknowledged as a BOINC Project and note that in BMGathome's case it is not listed as a project when you wish to attach to a project of your choice..

Thank you for listening...Keep on crunching and have a nice day.

I agree with Tuna. Removing BMG from the BOINC wiki was a little premature. Unless you are going to outline a standard to apply as a template across all of the BOINC projects and then go through and clean house every week/month, this was the wrong thing to do. Primaboinca has had little contact/response from admins in months. 123numbers (Van Der Waerden Numbers) hasn't replied in months either. CAS rarely communicates in their forums. Ibercivis sometimes responds and sometimes will go months without a peep. The above mentioned projects (I would not include CSG IMO because Travis is typically pretty good about things) and many past projects would also have fit in this category. I'm not a fan of project admins not addressing donor concerns, but that isn't a requirement of the job they have. It is their project, not ours. Sure, post in the forums that you are displeased with their behavior for others to be forwarned. However, being biased and deleting them from the wiki when we have had so many others with the same issue for years is a bit absurd.

Reading Tuna's first paragraph, I hadn't realised the project was actually still granting credits. So, even though the admin is not responding, the project is still functioning after a fashion, and I take back my suggestion about retiring it.

I would ask that people don't say things that imply the project admin doesn't care about the crunchers. He could have suddenly taken ill for example.

@Coleslaw. My sincere apologies for misleading you and others who read my message. It is my Bad.. There is a big difference in saying Have and or will. I do have the authority to remove the project from the List of known projects in the Wiki, but I have not done so at the time of writing the message. The reason being I put the cart before the horse. When I checked the wicki after posting my message, BMGathome was not listed on the wicky, therefore I could not remove it even if I wanted to. Having said that please note that David Anderson has indicated on BOINC Forum that he intends to discontinue the listing in the Wicki. No indication given why. What it realy means for us is that we need to judge individually weather you wish to crunch the project or not. I can see that without guidelines this could adversely effect us as unless we talk amongst ourself and point out our feelings, problems we could be used as a free source without as much as thank you for your time for there are project Admins that seem to follow that line. It is not sufficient to just complain, ask whatever on their forum for information is lost in large forums and it takes hours to research all projects, we need a central point to discuss this and warn others not to waste their time. I believe it is not within the realm of BOINC Stats and it should be in BOINC Forum. Voicing it here could serve as a source of tool for Willy the Admin should at a time to come we need to seriously think of retiring the project. Logically that is too early since some are still getting credit including me, so in that sence the project is not dead. As regards comparing to other projects that also do not communicate is not a good comparison for we are not cometing which is the worst of all. Those projects in my opinion should be listed in a "Name and Shame" forum for all to see that we are being used and not even thanked for our efforts and not even our questions are answered..Note again, I did say that for all I know it might not even be Bradley's fault for he might even be dead.

I'm fine with people saying they are displeased. However, if a project is still operating and divvying work, then it is not "dead". It just may not be desirable. I think posting your concerns in any forums is good because not everyone visits the BOINC forums. Not everyone comes here. Not everyone reads project forums. Not everyone is part of a team. So, I tend to post my concerns at projects and at my team's forums when I have issues and will occasionally spread the word elsewhere, but there is no "central place". The problem with the BOINC world in general is that there is nothing central about it. Those that feel they spend too much time research a poorly ran project in my experience haven't really spent all that much time on it. Probably spent more time getting familiar with BOINC and how the projects page is setup then actually researching it.

Looks like he *might* have taken the (Amazon virtual host) server down:

This project now is marked as retired, but it not removed from my hosts automatic and I am not able to remove it in manual way, because I am connected to BAM...

Thread is a little old but I followed from BAM (The Projects: Announcements) to an Internet search back to THIS thread when I couldn't reach it.


I wanted to suggest perhaps an additional status: Idle - which would mean the project is running but there's no communication from the admin(s). This would be in-between Active and Inactive...

On that note maybe a differentiation on projects (especially Beta) that don't continuously release work?