After Tristin completed his magic, I was assigned to 2 additional projects in addition to World Community Grid. These two projects were LHC and Rosetta. Now I'm assigned to three projects, World Community Gird (which currently has a points problem), Rosetta (where things seem to be functioning normally) and LHC that was assigned to my hosts but set to "no new tasks". The potential problem with LHC is it is a VirtualBox project. Some of my hosts have it installed and some don't. Additionally, because VirtualBox uses multiple CPUs per work unit, it can mess up the BOINC scheduler at times. Since Charity Engine sets the "no new tasks" flag, are we supposed to allow work which seems to be counterproductive. What is the reason for "no new tasks" to be set? So, in essence, I'm only getting points from Rosetta. Does the system assign additional projects and how often? Does it only happen after intervention from Charity Engine staff? How are they chosen and in what priority?
I'm not sure I have answers to most of your questions, but perhaps a few thoughts will help:
If your hosts are assigned to a project that does not have suitable work (e.g. if LHC does not have any work for their native apps, such as "SixTrack", and the host does not have VirtualBox capability), then they will just do more work for others.
We occasionally set "no new tasks" for many reasons; to temporarily scale back contributions to a project, or to work out problems (such as with WCG), or to allow hosts to finish the work they have in progress prior to detaching.
There is no schedule for assignment of different projects. In your case, there was a hangup in the automated account creation process that was preventing projects from being set up for you. We choose and assign projects according to what we think will best meet the goals of Charity Engine, which include doing good, charitable work and also keeping volunteers satisfied.
This isn't always ideal for everyone, but we appreciate hearing the thoughts and preferences of users here in the forum--it's one of the few ways for us to better understand the end user experience. If there are different projects or priorities that you think are important, we will gladly discuss to consider how it may improve the work we're doing in the big picture.
Thank you for the response. After contributing to CE for a total of about 10 days and amassing close to 1 million points, based on what is showing in the BOINC client, my CE dashboard still shows 0 points. When clicking on the "MORE" button, I see close to 700,000 points assigned to my hosts. Concerning LHC, ALL hosts were set to "no new tasks" regardless of whether VirtualBox was installed. When I enabled LHC, I got work from the project and it executed successfully so I don't understand why it was set to "no new tasks". But aside from that, why assign me to a project that is set to "no new tasks"? It is too difficuly to understand how this site works and how points and projects are assigned. There isn't any motivation to continue to contribute here when nothing changes day after day after day. Why hasn't the dashboard shown the points for Rosetta? I assume points are not updated daily or there should be something there. I noticed that there seems to be a link between this site and Grid Republic so I went to Grid Republic to see if it might be better to contribute there. That site is as unattended as this site. Project list is horribly out of date, not much activity in the discussion threads. Both sites seem to suffer from neglect. I also noticed there isn't a way to delete an account from either site so I guess a mess of barely used accounts continue to accumulate.
Similar to what happened to another user recently, your CPID is not merging between projects. I flagged it to go through the confirmation process again, which will fix it if project servers respond. This will then fix the dashboard, except for the WCG points, which are still stuck. Also, WCG has been removed for you, since you expressed interest in removing it in another thread. That way your hosts can focus on projects that are delivering points today. (Maybe LHC again soon).
How Charity Engine works is a bit simplistic compared to BOINC. There is minimal management to be done by users. The users who want to register are entered into a prize drawing, as a motivation in addition to the charitable cause of donating compute resources. The dashboard is an important part of that, and should be updating daily, so I'm hoping to see yours fixed shortly.
After Tristin completed his magic, I was assigned to 2 additional projects in addition to World Community Grid. These two projects were LHC and Rosetta. Now I'm assigned to three projects, World Community Gird (which currently has a points problem), Rosetta (where things seem to be functioning normally) and LHC that was assigned to my hosts but set to "no new tasks". The potential problem with LHC is it is a VirtualBox project. Some of my hosts have it installed and some don't. Additionally, because VirtualBox uses multiple CPUs per work unit, it can mess up the BOINC scheduler at times. Since Charity Engine sets the "no new tasks" flag, are we supposed to allow work which seems to be counterproductive. What is the reason for "no new tasks" to be set? So, in essence, I'm only getting points from Rosetta. Does the system assign additional projects and how often? Does it only happen after intervention from Charity Engine staff? How are they chosen and in what priority?
I'm not sure I have answers to most of your questions, but perhaps a few thoughts will help:
This isn't always ideal for everyone, but we appreciate hearing the thoughts and preferences of users here in the forum--it's one of the few ways for us to better understand the end user experience. If there are different projects or priorities that you think are important, we will gladly discuss to consider how it may improve the work we're doing in the big picture.
Thank you for the response. After contributing to CE for a total of about 10 days and amassing close to 1 million points, based on what is showing in the BOINC client, my CE dashboard still shows 0 points. When clicking on the "MORE" button, I see close to 700,000 points assigned to my hosts. Concerning LHC, ALL hosts were set to "no new tasks" regardless of whether VirtualBox was installed. When I enabled LHC, I got work from the project and it executed successfully so I don't understand why it was set to "no new tasks". But aside from that, why assign me to a project that is set to "no new tasks"? It is too difficuly to understand how this site works and how points and projects are assigned. There isn't any motivation to continue to contribute here when nothing changes day after day after day. Why hasn't the dashboard shown the points for Rosetta? I assume points are not updated daily or there should be something there. I noticed that there seems to be a link between this site and Grid Republic so I went to Grid Republic to see if it might be better to contribute there. That site is as unattended as this site. Project list is horribly out of date, not much activity in the discussion threads. Both sites seem to suffer from neglect. I also noticed there isn't a way to delete an account from either site so I guess a mess of barely used accounts continue to accumulate.
Similar to what happened to another user recently, your CPID is not merging between projects. I flagged it to go through the confirmation process again, which will fix it if project servers respond. This will then fix the dashboard, except for the WCG points, which are still stuck. Also, WCG has been removed for you, since you expressed interest in removing it in another thread. That way your hosts can focus on projects that are delivering points today. (Maybe LHC again soon).
How Charity Engine works is a bit simplistic compared to BOINC. There is minimal management to be done by users. The users who want to register are entered into a prize drawing, as a motivation in addition to the charitable cause of donating compute resources. The dashboard is an important part of that, and should be updating daily, so I'm hoping to see yours fixed shortly.