Comments on the following newsitem http://hydrogenathome.org//all_news.php#58

I do NOT like the H2@home participation << by invitation>> associated with Boinc. It simply sucks too much. It remind me some kind of fraudulous overseas financial services only offered, <<by invitation>>... Relics from another era. Either you ought to open account creation as other project use or you keep it loud. I would definitively not shout it out as "missing in invitation"...

We are all entitled to our opinions, but you have to understand I am the only developer on this project and I say that in the looses sense possible. I have no formal training in web development and I am learning as I go. Sure if it was a full time job, or I have additional volunteer admins who knew what they were doing then we would enjoy implementing many things such as a captcha where we can filter the bots from the people. I am aware that some projects are suffering from spam currently, I am more concerned with someone making a stink about that then the easy use of H2@H. When the security flaws of captcha get worked out on other project and/or it becomes part of our SVN, sure I'll use that.

Again I am only a guy with a Biology background and some moundane IT and I confess to be your intellectual inferior with technology. I only have an idea about hydrogen. I welcome the opportunity to have support from BOINC developers which I currently get from many altruistic people in the community. Gradually you will see the features you want. This is only an alpha project, as such you should not expect everything perfect at first.

I mean my response with no animosity, I'm just trying to describe the way it is. The last thing I want someone to think is I am some kind of snake oil sales man.

I haven't crunched Hydrogen@Home, but if it's still an alpha project then what Jacky says seems perfectly reasonable to me. The first consideration in this situation has to be reducing the volume of problems and not increasing the workload with unnecessary complications.

Just my 20 Won.

It still is very much an Alpha project. There are quite a few issues that Jack is grappling with right now. And he's working extremely hard to resolve them and take the project to the next level.

There are people who sign up for projects and then whine and cry when work isn't available, errors out, blows up their computers, doesn't get credit, etc. Alpha testing isn't for everyone. It's usually easier to work with a small group of dedicated volunteers who are willing to report bugs, systematically test things, talk with the developers, etc. In fact, there's about 10 of us who alpha test privately for one of the production level BOINC projects (And no, I won't say which one becuase there's no testing going on right this instant and the admin is happy with the group of testers he has).

But when you get down to it, it's Jack's playground. And if he wants to keep account creation closed until the project is ready to hit beta stage, then that's his call.

And yes, I'm one of the testers at Hydrogenand I've watched quite a few results fail on both my machines today. So let the throwing of rotten tomatoes commence. I can take it.

I'll give one reason why an invitation code isn't so bad. It'll stop your project from becoming something like this: VTU Top Users list .. please count how many non-spam-bots (humans) you can find in the first 10 pages.

Then decide if an invitation code is really such a relic.

For the record, that site is VGTU@home, not the VTU@home that shows in the stats here on BOINCstats.

And one manifestation of the spambot is user of the day there.