Taking over a Team

[Hoov_CCSP]

Is there anyway to take over a team whose home has gone the way of the Dodo bird, and who's founder has not been active in the team in a very long time, and who is ignoring all requests about the team?

The team I belong to is dying a slow death. I am willing to give it a new home, but because of copyright issues, the name needs to be changed. But the original owner is ignoring me and several others who have inquired about it.

Any idea's?

[7im]

PM "dlucent" and include as much supportive evidence as you can.

[kazriko]

dlucent hasn't logged in for nearly 2 months. Is there someone else we can bug about this?

[VijayPande]

We currently do not support taking over of old teams, since it's very possible that the team members may choose to come back or wish their team record their contributions as it was.

[Hoov_CCSP]

I can understand your point, but you may want to reconsider. For instance, I am part of the CastleCops team. CastleCops no longer exists. The site folded up and the staff was not notified even after the fact. Even at that, they had closed the home pages of their folding at home team. I have tried contacting them regarding the team, and while I know they are getting the messages, there are no answers coming back. There are now 13 active users with a total of 80 CPU's left active out of a total of 232 users.

While I know that teams are not the point of folding at home, it does give the users something they can feel part of. A group of people that tend to congregate together, socialize together, and all the other things that are part of being a group.

You know this, because you designed the system to have teams. If you truly don't think that being part of a team contributes to the folding at home experience, then I suggest you take the cycles used to keep track of the teams, and use it for running more folding at home clients, and just dissolve the teams all together.

[k1wi]

Pande group aren't saying that teams don't have a point in F@H. What they're saying is they don't agree with teams being taken over without the permission of the former owner.

Personally, if I had to take a break from F@H (perhaps at short notice and unable to hand over control) and came back to see I'd lost control of the team I set up, I'd be pretty upset.

k1wi

[Hoov_CCSP]

But this isn't a short break. CastleCops has been dead since December of 2008, and had stopped supporting the Folding at Home team about 6 months prior to that.

CastleCops has been reduced to a single landing page http://www.castlecops.com/ with a reference to a Slashdot article http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/27/1624220 , which has not seen any action since the end of 2008.

The owners have shown no interest in any DC project since long before the site died.

I can understand a month, two months, even 6 months, but there has to be a time where you just have to move on. So their should be either a process for someone to take over a team, or for someone to move their entire profile, points and all, to a new team.

I have been folding since late 2004. I believe there was just over 100,000 active CPU's when I first started, now there is over 350,000 active folders, and probably over a million folders total. If I stop with the team I am with now, I am just going to stop.

Again I know it has nothing to do with the points, but with the results. But when we had a home, we had a good time as a group. My team has no home that we can do with what we want. I have no place to relate to the others on my team. I am willing to give the team a home, but with it as it is, if I do, I am opening myself up for legal problems.

[kazriko]

The problem is, the former owner wasn't an owner of the site at all, he was hardly even a member of the forum that the team was for, 54626. He did 10 total work units and completely vanished, taking with him the password. Much of the rest of the team is still on the forum and wants our work units to go to a team with the name of the forum. There's only 3 active members of the team, and together we've done 2,374,329 out of 2,753,568 points for the team over the last 3 years. At least half of the rest of the people are still active members of the forum even if they're not doing folding anymore. We could start a new team but that would mean losing ten thousand work units and 2.3 million points to a dead team where the slacker who set it up won't answer his emails and seems to have completely vanished from the face of the net.

All very aggravating.

[kazriko]

I even sent in the message with name and information of the owner of the original site and who owns the current site so that you could contact him directly. He just went along with a team one of the new members created at the time not knowing that there was no way to recover it once that new member disappeared.

[kazriko]

(BTW, this is not the same site as the other guy above, this is a separate issue that we've been trying to resolve for the last year.)

[kiore]

I am symphathetic to your problem, but why not start a new team with the remaining members you can contact. I know it seems a pity to break up and team and to lose whatever standing you had, but it can be exciting as well to start from scratch. I recently did this myself and do not regret it.

Addit: and this time set up a founding group that can take over that role if the actual founder retires etc.

[kazriko]

We would have if we had setup the team instead of some random helpful-at-the-time person in the forum do it...

We can contact all currently active members, that's not a problem. Of course, changing the team number of 15 different systems scattered around our various server rooms and houses is tougher. I even have my old Arkaic team that I can convert to a Gameslurp team instead and give rights to Azz for it. It's unfortunate that we've wasted 2 years on something and they can't even recover it for the person who owns the site that the team is tied to. I mean, who actually owns the team? The random person who registered it, or the site that it was tied to? Apparently, any random person can register a team under any name and have control over it with the current rules, shutting out those who actually run the site that is tied to that name.

[kazriko]

Grah! I can't even recover my Arkaic team either, as I can't remember which of the myriad of email addresses I have was used to register it, and apparently they didn't send me an email when I did so that I could figure it out...

[k1wi]

kazriko.... two years of folding for an old team isn't two years wasted

At least your individual stats should show the points earned in all teams...

I like to think of setting up a new team as starting a computer game over... You know, to regather the excitement you get when you're starting out I think most users here on the forums have probably folded for more than one team - I myself got introduced to it by one team, and then left it to create and grow my own team. I've gathered 70 other users now

k1wi

[kazriko]

It's really frustrating though. It also seems utterly arbitrary how he posts in one thread that he won't help people reclaim the team that belongs to them, then turns around on another thread and says he'll refer it to someone else to help them reclaim their team.

And it seems like not just time wasted, but money wasted too. I spent $150 getting my original 20gig PS3 replaced because I left it on for a year straight doing folding and it burned out in the process.