Friendly forums

I've noticed that there seems to be much more activity on the seventeenorbust forum than any other distributed computing forums I've visited. I associate this with the friendly people who visit it. For this reason we've developed into more of a community than a forum. I would just like to thank everyone who participates and posts here for being active and I'd like to encourage those of you who read the forums regularly but don't often post to put up a couple posts and show your faces. After all my favorite thing about seventeenorbust is that i can check the forums a couple times a day and theres almost always something new to read. After all these forums aren't just for technical discussion they are now part of the social enviroment that has made this my favorite project todate.

keep up the good work.

I beg to differ. I've found that there is an extremely small group of participants posting in this forum. And the biggest problem is that the organisation behind SoB is hardly posting at all.
Or at least reacting to the problems some participants have mentioned.

I've posted several problems/question and up till now I've never received a usefull of helpfull answer. Being used to (among others) the distributed folding forum this is very disappointing.

I know we have to help each other but the people with the real knowledge (the organisation) are too inactive for my taste.

Just my 2 cents.

an explanation for that comes from the fact that many of the problems wit hthe client lie not in the coding from louis but from the cores that were used. And in addition to that louis has been very busy lately with school, just letting you know since the semiester will probably be closing soon that means before long he'll probably be much more active on the forums, however before that happens he will face finals first. This will mean nothing for at least a few weeks. I will agree with that statement that many problems recieve no attention, however I've also noticed taht many of the questions people ask have been addressed previously in previous threads. I'm not sure exactly what problem you might have had so of course i don't know if this situation applys to you.

What i was refering to was more the non-technical aspects of the forums where people who aren't the leaders of the project, but simply the participants come together to discuss the project and just random brickerbrack with other. This has formed as i said before a friendly community. I'm not sure exactly how the leaders of the distributed folding may be able to allocate so much time to the project but remember that seventeenorbust is a non-profit organization and as far as i know they hav never recieved any funding of any sort from anyone. Therefore i find it is rather amazing that they have accomplished as much as they have. Perhaps if someone has the ability to do so and wishes to see this project become more activly worked on they could help find a sponsor?

[DPC]Mobster is not only referring to questions about the client, but also about other undocumented things. Just look at the last some asked question on the board, no answers..

Some of mine..
( http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...&threadid=3373 , http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...&threadid=4695 )

I have absolutely no idea what the project leaders do for a living.

And if a question is already answered I don't see harm in pointing that out or linking the thread in which that person thinks the answer lies.

I think that a forum is mainly for solving problems and helping each other out (participants as well as organisation) with the project as a whole. That means stats, core, clients, site, forum etc.

That is what I miss here. I can understand that if Louis is the only person behind this project, he hasn't got all the time to answer all our questions but some feedback is necessary for a project to keep hold of your participants.

To add to other people's comments: It's pretty hard for people iin a forum to help each other when they don't have any information at all themselves. I mean: how many DC projects are there for which there isn't even a "FAQ" that you can refer to? Just because a question has been asked before (and maybe many times) doesn't mean that it has been answered before.

Like many others, I'll happily cut everybody in the world all the slack they want. So Louis is busy at college. Good for him. No problem. But he's so busy that he cannot spend one hour a month scanning the forum and just posting a few lines to the effect of "I hear that there is this problem, Ill look into it"? Just an acknowledgement that we (the users) exist? That our questions are actually going somewhere instead of ending in the great bit-bucket in the sky?

I do not think that this has a lot to do with funding: imagine you found a "sponsor" for this project. And then? Then you'd have a guy who receives money but is too busy with school to maintain his code instead of a guy who is broke and too busy with school to maintain his code. How would that improve things?

Once you release software into the world it becomes your support-responsibility. Unless you are willing to share that responsibility with others. We don't need some kind of "paid programmer" because there's literally hundreds of people out here who'd be happy to lend a hand with the client (or the server or the web-site) for free. So what exactly would you do with "funding"?

What friendly help can I offer when someone asks (the hundredths time on this forum) why total production sometimes counts backwards? Once I actually posted what I concluded was the most likely scenario, the management responded by saying that I'm wrong. Well, thank you, but what is the right answer? How are friendly people supposed to help each other when management has all the answers, doesn't release them, doesn't even acknowledge the questions?

If there is a community of friendly, helpful 17-OB'ers then it is because this project needs an inordinate amount friendly helpers before you can get anything at all done. There's not a lot of friendly helpfull chatter about (insert other DC project here) because those projects just work -- you install some client according to some instructions and you start it and that's it. A small minority of people actually dive into the netherworlds of add-ons, monitors, service-clients and all those complications that are essentially required in 17OB.

In the year for which I have monitored this project, it has turned from a hapless amateurish little shoestring production in someone's garage to ... a hapless amateurish little shoestring production in someone's garage.

Perfectly good start for my taste, but no progress since. So you get a bunch of the "amateurish shoestring production" enthusiasm on this board. The "let's get this baby off the ground" hurrah. The warm fuzzy grassroots feeling. But for how long can you pretend that this is a startup and that the bugs will be worked out later?

I don't think it's terribly fair to say that Louie never spends any time on these forums. Up until early August Louie was posting almost daily. OK, so he's taken a three month break from SoB let's not get too heavy. Sometimes we all need a serious break from our 'hobbies' when they begin to take up too much of our lives.

Before the DoS attacks all was working OK for most people - the rate of growth in the projects stats was testament to that. Then at n=5M the client breaks for P4s - the 'fix' isn't great, but we all still have a damn site better chance of finding a prime here than with GIMPS.

I agree that the lack of any information from Louie (besides a temporary bugfix and an averted DDOS) since 2nd of august is most frustrating.

The bad handling of the SSE2 problem didn't help. You could atleast say this is a temporary fix and that the problem is being worked on.


Louie, if you read this, please take a few minutes and write a post telling us where we stand.

@MikeH. You could be right and if that is the case then I apologize. I only have been around the project for a couple of months now and I made my judgement upon those 2 or 3 months.

@Lagardo. Maybe it's the language barrier or something but you said the precise things I wanted to point out. Not all negative but it's about time that this project is getting a bit better organized cause now it is going nowhere slow.

@Lagardo Bravo.. As Mobster said, you wrote what we mean.

@Louis, nofi (!) I just wanna hear a 'I'm working on that one' or 'Kinda busy, but let you know soon' in stead of nothing..

As many of you point out, I am quite busy right now. I don't have time to work on SB or answer every question on the forums these days like I used to.

I miss being here.

But I can make time when ceselb speaks up.

The SSE2 fix is meant to be temporary. I was busy when I got the report about the bug and I'm even busier now. I can't promise a fix by Christmas, but I do expect to work on it again before new years. By Mid-January, I hope to be spending more time here like in the good ol' days.

SSE2, linux, new factoring code.


Cheers,
Louie

Thanks, this will put a lot of minds at rest. :cheers:

ahh men

It's good to hear a few words.

Good luck in finals.

Quote:

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Originally posted by jjjjL
By Mid-January, I hope to be spending more time here like in the good ol' days.

SSE2, linux, new factoring code.


Cheers,
Louie

---

Nice to hear this. Hope to see you around sometime.

Until then, we'll patiently crunching =)))

Good to hear from you, Louie! :cheers:

I wish you success for your finals and hope you find yourself having free time again as soon as possible. :thumbs:

(This post has been moved to a new thread called "Ramblings of an Apologetic Young Mind." See <http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...&threadid=5188>.)