Hi Howard,
I understand that you guys from DF are bound to deadlines with CASP5. However, you should be aware, that we are the driving force behind your (possible) success with (not only) CASP5. By investing electricity that we have to pay for along with making our hardware available to you guys, we also fund your project to a significant if not the major part.
Therefore, I think it is by far not asked too much, if we suggest to you to inform us IMMEDIATELY as soon as a protein change is coming up and to plan your project at least 3 weeks in advance with appropriate announcements made public in the news section of your website.
Right now, our team - and therefore your project - will most likely loose several millions of structures just because some of our computers are not accessible before end of thursday. We have experienced this for several times now and now it is enough. I think you should be aware, that a lot of boxes are running offline and people have other things to do than baby-sitting those boxes for you all around the day.

If something like this is going to happen only one more time, I fear you will loose most if not all of our support.

In general, I do not understand, why the DF server does not accept and credit the upload of valid protein structures even after a new protein has been set up. This really is an unprofessional issue with this project. Also, the "autoupdate" does not automatically stop the running client, take over the remaining structures generated for the previous protein and then start to crunch on the new protein. It always needs client restart (and therefore human interference) due to this "server maintainance period". I think it is high time for a satisfying correction of these issues.

Sorry for being "a little" upset tonight, but this really appears as a waste of our time and money
Michael.