Projects with no descriptions

[Ben1234]

I've seen this topic a few times (as a lurker on this forum until today) and it's usually followed up by admin telling the OP that they'll send reminder emails out, but for the last few years, when I do FAH, I've been getting WU from the same individual that have no descriptions.

Like any system FAH is open to abuse, and I hope it isn't as we run on good faith, but how do I know a researcher hasn't just decided to turn my spare computing power and electric bills into crypto as well as research?

Obviously adding a description isn't going to stop this, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that I'm offering computing power where the researcher hasn't even bothered to put the effort in to cut and paste a description. That feels like I'm being scammed. I stopped offering compute because of this issue before (to be clear, I changed the topic I supported from general to one not in the field that has the lack of descriptions).

This time I'm debating just switching to boinc or other charitable cause / compute effort.

[BobWilliams757]

Personally I don't worry much about it, and I've always assumed the oversight and vetting process for the researchers to be part of the program are more than sufficient to keep any nefarious uses from taking place.

That said, I'm not at all discounting how it may make you or others feel, and that there should be a process that prevents this from happening in at least all but urgent type situations that are likely rare. The perception from those that might be willing to fold should be a prime consideration if they want to attract new folders and/or retain existing folders long term. I can understand that nothing will ever be perfect, but in this instance having a volunteer that is considering moving to other projects is something the powers that be should be acting on.

[Ben1234]

Thanks for the response but I'm pretty much giving up on FAH now (cue memes about not needing to announce )
Community and teams seems to have rapidly disappeared (e.g. see dogecoinfah, down significantly on active members - Active Members: 387/20,972), discords and forums are now anaemic rather than academic. I know FAH has a new client in the works but for me it's a little late and I simply worry about running FAH on my internal network now.

Personally I don't worry much about it, and I've always assumed the oversight and vetting process for the researchers to be part of the program are more than sufficient to keep any nefarious uses from taking place.

That said, I'm not at all discounting how it may make you or others feel, and that there should be a process that prevents this from happening in at least all but urgent type situations that are likely rare. The perception from those that might be willing to fold should be a prime consideration if they want to attract new folders and/or retain existing folders long term. I can understand that nothing will ever be perfect, but in this instance having a volunteer that is considering moving to other projects is something the powers that be should be acting on.

[tvdsluis]

I sometimes have the same feeling as well.
Today i created ANOTHER new topic for a project without description.
If researchers can't be bothered with informing us what we are working on why would we bother donating our compute power?
I also don't see a lot of news or updates about research projects anymore, and that's how distributed projects end.
Look at WCG, a ghost of it's former self.
I left that DC project a year ago, and many with me.
For now i still support F@H but it gets harder to stay motivated...

[appepi]

I agree that it is at best discourteous when beneficiaries of donated time and money - electricity and computer use costs both, after all - fail to provide a project description. That being said, this biology stuff is not in my skillset, so I stopped reading beyond the title a long time ago, and I tend to assume that major donors like (say) Hewlett Packard Enterprise Solutions wouldn't be on FaH if their time was being diverted to improper purposes, so my own elderly HP workstations aren't wasting their time. And THAT being said, there is already more than enough discourtesy in cyberspace so maybe there should be a generous time limit (say a week) for providing a description and automatic exclusion thereafter. And I would like to know what all those BENCHMARKING projects are about, too.

[Jonazz]

I don't know of any other distributed computing project which actually has a seperate description for every single project. BOINC projects often have weird names leaving you clueless. Even if a project doesn't have a description, you can be certain you're contributing to valuable science.

I actually know several BOINC projects have been having supply issues. AI and hardware improvements make it easier to do the necessary work in-house. FAH is still very computation hungry though!

Though I do agree, every project should have a description when leaving beta status at the latest. It's an excellent low effort way to incentivize folders.

[appepi]

Project 17648 has no description.

[toTOW]

Project 17648 has no description.

Oh whoops thanks for flagging. I forgot to upload one! Will fix now