Folding Forum

FAH is a fantastic idea that I think many computer novices would be interested in supporting if they knew it existed. My question is, why not pool some of the donations made to support this program and take out some advertisements on major websites or even in national newspapers to get the word out? It would be amazing if the idea of FAH could "go viral" across the globe.. The idea of supporting projects like this would seep into the consciousness of everyone who owns a computer, and installing FAH would become second nature for anyone the moment they set up a new piece of hardware. The amount of computing power going to waste at this very moment is incredibly sad. If someone at the project is willing to set up a fundraising pool dedicated to promoting FAH, I've got a hundred bucks ready to toss in.

I would be curious to chat more about this possibility. In the past, Google donated free advertising in terms of free adwords. However, my group's expertise is in computational methods, biology, and drug design, which are all pretty far from mass marketing. So, in addition to funds, we would probably need the use of some agency or advisor who is well versed in advertising.

However, with that said, we have been able to get word of mouth working well, generally driven by PR which came from new, important results from FAH. This has worked very well over the years, with numerous press articles:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q= ... av_num=100

We are nearing the time for a new press push, with some new results coming out.

I'd like to offer my humble opinion as a casual, occasional folder. People who are involved enough with F@H to use this forum generally care enough to spend time setting up clients, understanding the point system and return bonuses, and looking at scientific results. Most of the public isn't. I personally didn't run F@H for a long time because it wasn't convenient enough to install the SMP client.

I think simplicity and social media are the keys to reaching a larger audience:

1. Simple install client. Only choice on the download page should be OS, and only choices on the client should be team name and user name. Let the bigadv types have a separate client with more options. It sounds like you are moving in this direction with v7.

2. Heavy Facebook integration. People really respond to Farmville type Facebook posts such as "I just processed 5 molecules fighting Alzheimer's for 2,000 points. Try to beat me at folding.stanford.edu/download/campbbri_facebookteam". You could even consider a separate ranking system for recruiting. "So-and-so is #3 recruiter with 543 users earning a total of 149842030 points"

I am suspicious of web ads for non-profits because I automatically think there's a corporate profit interest involved, but maybe others feel differently.

Good luck and thanks for doing what you do!

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, we are moving to the point where there is just one client on the download page (v7). I agree that would help a lot. We're also starting to do fb integration (right now the main web page and the stats pages are integrated and we're looking for ways to integrate it more dynamicallly).

I just made a post promoting Folding and some BOINC-projects on the cancerforums.net. I thought the people there would be very interested in running these programs to battle cancer. But I was banned 5 minutes later for promoting other websites...

I've had a little luck gaining new folders by spreading the word on other forums I visit (music, technology, religious debate, and other random subjects). I think if everyone would do just a little folding "evangelism" on casual forums, it would help a great deal. Even if you pick up just one extra folder, that's one more than we had yesterday.

Here is the post I made with the title "Use your PC to help cure cancer". Feel free to press the quote button, then copy and paste the text/code below to use on other forums:



Some of you have probably heard of Folding@Home. Basically, this is a distributed computing project run by Stanford University designed to search for cures to various diseases by doing protein simulations. Here's how it works: You install a small program on your PC, it downloads "work units" to that use the spare processing power of your CPU to crunch numbers for medical research. When the work unit is completed, your PC sends it back and downloads a new one. The Folding program essentially ties together thousands of individual computers from around the world to run these calculations, getting them done much faster than any existing supercomputer. It's a great cause that anyone can participate in.

You can read about it here:

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-main
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

For most people, the "uniprocessor" option during installation is the best choice. This is the version that takes up the least resources and only runs in the background when you aren't doing anything else. The newest version of folding software can be downloaded Here.

For those interested in more advanced options (such as folding with your video card), here is a detailed guide for how to set it up.

This a great way to help fight disease with minimal effort. Please check it out and consider joining us!

I like the idea of doing some advertising on Facebook. Its easy to make a Facebook ad, but you do have to pay per click. The "make your own ad" is right there on the right hand side. Use that colorful atom-bubble logo thing and a concentrated powerful message and it should grow really fast. I also completely agree that v7 is the right direction. I started folding back in October 2010 and ran a couple of Main clients on my quad-core because the bunch of "these are beta clients for experts, they require more maintanence, be sure to back up your computer before installing" messages scared me off for several months, even though I wanted to donate as much as I could. Not only will v7 make it F@h easier for donors, but I hope that it can make it easy for them to donate more than one processor if they so desire. In all advertising, something I feel is important to emphasize is that they can back out of donating at any time, and that its easy to uninstall. In my opinion, people may be more comfortable donating processing time if they know that its all right to shut their machine down if they want.

Good to hear from the man himself. Great project Professor!