I've been trying to devise ways of recruiting people to crunch for Rosetta for over a year. I doubt that in my efforts I've attracted more then a handful of users... how did ESL bring 3,000 users to Rosetta in a week? What is the participation rate of ESL members in Rosetta/BOINC? How did you spread the word? What brought 3,000 people over the edge all at the same time? It looks like a new team with very little crunching for other projects. What were people doing with a dozen PCs prior to Rosetta?

I'd love to figure out how to replicate your success in recruiting crunchers.

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Are there any similar leagues that you are rivals with? Perhaps we could get them to start a team and try to take on the challenge of topping your RAC.

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Answered one of my own questions:
Looks like they've got about 18,000 users on any given day, over 600,000 registered! and almost 4,000 enrolled in Rosetta... so far. Over 27,000 new users registered just in 2007!

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Are there any similar leagues that you are rivals with? Perhaps we could get them to start a team and try to take on the challenge of topping your RAC.

I've read wikipedia and found out, that there is the
Clanbase (overtook 2004 by the Global Gaming League) having more members than the esl.

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Well, all guys who are registert at the ESL are gamers, and all gamers love competitions. The aim of the ESL was to become the number one and all members try to beat each other team :)

If you want to recruit more users you should talk to the admins of the game leagues so mayby you can make an official competition.

But first you have to inform the community better , cause many members of the ESL are afraid that you spy their computers.

http://www.esl.eu/de/news/36281/?comment=0#comments

greetz
Benedikt "Kardinal" Otto

I don't speak German, so was not able to get much out of the link you posted.

But I understand the concern some people have about the privacy of their machine and their life. Do you have any ideas on anything that might ease those concerns for people? I mean the more to post a large message saying "...and noone is spying on you!" the more it looks like a lie. And so the approach basically ends up being to focus on the science and hopefully win people over by producing results.

Do you think that downloading the applications over the internet makes people any more suspicious then they would be if they installed the applications from a CD?

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But I understand the concern some people have about the privacy of their machine and their life.

You understand people that are concerned about their privacy AND use Windows? Me not! Furthermore, real gamers give a s*** about their privacy, they are only concerned about their fps. Sorry to sound harsh, but that's the truth (at least for me :D)

you participate in science project but you want to hide your machine? thats a contradiction of common sense. whats so big about hiding your machine but showing your id? as a hard core gamer i would suspect those of you in hiding would have a few firewalls and other goodies to keep out snoopers. so whats the paranoia?

But I understand the concern some people have about the privacy of their machine and their life.

You understand people that are concerned about their privacy AND use Windows? Me not! Furthermore, real gamers give a s*** about their privacy, they are only concerned about their fps. Sorry to sound harsh, but that's the truth (at least for me :D)

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Yes, you could most likely create a 2nd Team like ESL with the ppl from Clanbase.com - They are having in parts the same users tho. (Overall all, ESL is mostly german, while Clanbase focused International)
The ESL news also brought a lot of secondary new users to rosetta, not only in their team, like we choosed to open an own team. If I would have knewn earlier about rosetta, I would have joined long ago. I only knew SETI@home from a friend, and that didnt seemed to be worth it for me ;)

Well, and it's not just Benedikt, or Germans, or ESLians that are concerned about privacy... Just look at the response that I received from the BOINC boards when I suggested they take a simple step to make it easier for people to offer assistence when new users post messages about having problems.

I mean if it is easier for people to get help, then it makes BOINC easier, ...at least to that person, right?

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How hard would it be to add a catagory to the Teams for "Online Gamers"??

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
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Well, and it's not just Benedikt, or Germans, or ESLians that are concerned about privacy... Just look at the response that I received from the BOINC boards when I suggested they take a simple step to make it easier for people to offer assistence when new users post messages about having problems.

I mean if it is easier for people to get help, then it makes BOINC easier, ...at least to that person, right?

NOT at the expense of privacy. There's way too much ceding of privacy going on now.

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Nemesis n. A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

if the code writers and other programing types need to know information about what computers are being affected, similar to the mac problem, then they can look at your user profile to see what kind of machine you have, but if your paranoid about privacy, then why even post what kind of machine you have, you might be found out or even post here at all. Someone might find a way to identify you and your machine.

This program doesn't ask your real name, and they don't go verify you name either. If you worried about privacy, then you better not even use your credit card online, they do share your data you know.

Well, and it's not just Benedikt, or Germans, or ESLians that are concerned about privacy... Just look at the response that I received from the BOINC boards when I suggested they take a simple step to make it easier for people to offer assistence when new users post messages about having problems.

I mean if it is easier for people to get help, then it makes BOINC easier, ...at least to that person, right?

NOT at the expense of privacy. There's way too much ceding of privacy going on now.

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you participate in science project but you want to hide your machine? thats a contradiction of common sense.

All except one of my machines don't belong to me and the owner told me to hide them. I know it's some kind of paranoid, but his wish is my command :)

At least I am not concerned about my privacy, I use ICQ, MSN, at least I use Windows :)and I know that these softwareproducts are spies^^, but mayby if you would introduce the rosetta@home project and say that this project is powered by the washington university and that this is a serious project without spies and whatever and you show results, I am sure more people would join rosetta@home. At least you will have to do an "education-campaign" so the people know what they are doing.

I try to translate some of the "problems" some persons expressed in the ESL thread:
1. they were afraid that this is a spy programm
2. they were afraid that their computers crash because they always have to work with full throttle (hope you know what i mean)

There will always be some people who will shout that these software is a spy and that it is not good for the computers but I think if you could convince some more persons it would be a step into the right way.

My suggestion is to make a competition between the game leagues and other platforms which are used by many computer-users who may have free ressources.
I woould suggest the game-movie-scene, like www.planet-videos.com or www.baltgames.lv or www.own-age.com here you may find many users, you just should contact the admins :)

you participate in science project but you want to hide your machine? thats a contradiction of common sense.

All except one of my machines don't belong to me and the owner told me to hide them. I know it's some kind of paranoid, but his wish is my command :)

Can't do to much about that can you... :)

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I try to translate some of the "problems" some persons expressed in the ESL thread:
1. they were afraid that this is a spy programm
2. they were afraid that their computers crash because they always have to work with full throttle (hope you know what i mean)

Don't install it on C: if your afraid of spy stuff, put it on D: and then create a shortcut to your desktop. I am doing that since I split my drive into 3 partitions. Due to that, C: is a bit crowded and D: a archive partition has plenty of room and is not anywhere near "program files" that are possibly prone to attack. I use a freeware firewall and have a antivirus program installed, both are active monitoring programs. Plus the wireless modem/router has its own firewall. So there is 3 layers of protection plus using a different partition that does not have any program files on it. Also from time to time use something like windows washer to clean up your temp files and other unneeded files and then wipe over the slack space with up to DOD level encryption. Can't get much better than that for safety.

I run my ROH at full throttle when I am not doing anything on my system and then at 50-75% when I am doing something. No crashes. So again not reliable info.

The people who do not read about ROH first before flaming their fears shouldn't be on the net in the first place. But I bet they use MSN or YIM or something else to communicate to the outside world instead of paper. HD based email programs are also prone to spyware and viruses and the list goes on. So in conclusion.. if you research your fears first you might find out they are false and secondly don't believe everything you read on the net. Especially about free laptops.

end of my preaching...lol Just don't understand the non logic thinking types for computer apps.

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All except one of my machines don't belong to me and the owner told me to hide them. I know it's some kind of paranoid, but his wish is my command :)

Can't do to much about that can you... :)

No, not really, owner of these machines is my boss :)

Benedikt, thanks for posting the translation. If you can, please post a reply to the concern about running full throttle. BOINC allows you to configure this in the General Prefernces. You can define the % of CPU you would like BOINC to use. And as Greg was saying, you can define the % of memory to use as well. These settings allow you to better control heat output and cooling fan speed.

Also, welcome the folks to come and post their questions and concerns on these boards. If they prefer to post in German, just ask them to begin the subject line with "German:" so it's clear. There are many German participants here that would be glad to help address their questions in their own language.

From the looks of things, most all the ESL folks are new to Rosetta and new to BOINC. So they must have lots of questions. Please encourage them to post.

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Hi, my name is Alex,

and I work for the ESL. As already mentioned, the ESL has more than 620,000 (active) members (and "active" means _really_ active, thus the numbers are not comparable to other leagues' numbers ;)) all over Europe with a high end PCs.
ESL is mainly an online gaming league, but moreover it is a community platform - and this can and has been used to aquire a high number of members. For example, users tend to "pimp" their player profiles as much as possible - and we have given them the opportunity to have a link to their Rosetta@home ranking within the ESL Team on that profile - this way the word about Rosetta@home spreaded very very quickly (viral marketing)...
On the other hand we (of course) posted some news (e.g. http://www.esl.eu/eu/news/36478/ (English), or: http://www.esl.eu/de/news/36281/ (German)) and opened up a message board only for Rosetta@home / distributed computing (http://www.esl.eu/de/forum/5/5352/ (German), or: http://www.esl.eu/eu/forum/139/5397/ (English))

There have been even more news and stuff, but you get the point. Very large community => many participants in the project :)