A personal report

[Alan C. Lawhon]

Most of the people I know just want plug and play.
1. Install
2. Hit fold.

I agree with (1.) and (2.) completely! I began my "folding career" two weeks ago. The plug and play nature of the download and installation of the V7 client was wonderful. In fact, it was so easy that I didn't even realize I was actually folding until I began noticing the FAHControl panel which magically appeared immediately following the installation. It was seamless and automatic. For "newbie" and novice folders that's exactly what you want!

Since I've been folding almost continuously 24/7, I haven't had a single problem. (I suspect some of the reason why my setup keeps humming right along is thanks to the intentional design decision(s) with the V7 client to set the defaults [for novices] so that crunching WUs does not overtax hardware and CPUs - especially on the less expensive "consumer grade" machines. There's a lot of good thinking that went into these decisions for the V7 client. Believe me, that "good thinking" is both noticed and appreciated.

If we really want to go all out to attract new folders, we need to stay with this KISS philosophy. If the perception of newbies that the FAH software is "easy to use" takes hold, they will be much more likely to mention FAH to their friends. (It will also be easier to talk potential donors into downloading the software if you can tell them: "It's so easy even I can do it!"

Edit by Mod: Split from another topic since it wasn't related to that actual discussion topic.

[art_l_j_PlanetAMD64]

I began my "folding career" two weeks ago.

Since I've been folding almost continuously 24/7, I haven't had a single problem.

Hello Alan, have you looked at your "Lawhonac" stats page here:
Lawhonac's contributions to Folding@home

There seems to be a problem, as it shows zero points and zero Work Units completed. I know that you said in your initial message link:

Greetings. My name is Alan C. Lawhon, a resident of Huntsville, Alabama, USA. I am a brand new “protein folder” as I am currently in my eighth day of folding with close to 30,000 points accumulated and 70 WUs completed. (I fold under the moniker: “Lawhonac”.)

Your statistics seem to have been zeroed out somehow, unless I'm looking at the wrong username?

You might want to check and find out what has happened to your points.

[Alan C. Lawhon]

Donor Statistics

Last updated: Wednesday December 26, 2012

Art:

I just queried "Donor Statistics" and here's what I got.

Number Donor Credit Total Team
Name is exactly starts with
Passkey
-- Name starts with Lawhonac
1 Lawhonac 54029 128 0

Don't know how you got what you got.

[Napoleon]

The official stats site seems to be acting weird for Lawhonac. When I search with "is exactly" "Lawhonac", I get no results. Option "starts with" "Lawhonac" yields just one result, and that seems to be right. However, clicking on the link shows 0 points and 0 WUs, just like Art said. The URL contains some weird garbage and goes to "rawhonac" summary.
http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/ma ... dppc%2EDwn

Now consider official stats for username Napoleon, for example. See the difference in the URL? BTW, only team 0 and team 191980 scores for Napoleon actually are my doing, the rest are other donors who have chosen the same username but a different team.
http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/ma ... e=Napoleon

You might want to search official stats using your passkey instead of username to verify your points. In any case, Kakao stats seems to get it right. Judging by the tables, rock steady production of GPU2 WUs and occasional CPU WU.
http://kakaostats.com/usum.php?u=1865530

Note that unofficial stats sites work a bit differently from official hourly statistics. They parse so called flat files which used to be generated by Stanford every 3 hours. Apparently they too are now generated on an hourly basis. The quote below is from http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Stats.

Monitoring stats updates automatically: available downloads and rules for use


The donor and team stats are updated every hour, although this can be delayed if there were a lot of work units to come back during that hour. We have been turning off web access to the stats database during stats updates (usually on the hour). Please do not use scripts to access the donor or team pages, but use the full donor list (flat files) instead. IP addresses which do not abide by our robots.txt rules will be banned.

The donor and team lists are generated now every hour and can be downloaded once an hour from these links:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/daily_user_summary.txt.bz2
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/daily_team_summary.txt.bz2

Downloads of the daily donor and team lists should be limited to no more than 24 downloads a day.

[bruce]

The reason that the stats for Lawhonac are a bit funky is that he's using an email address, not just 8 characters. It "Starts With" Lawhonac and, for that matter, it starts with Lawhonac@ but it's not "exactly" Lawhonac. To help prevent spam, the stats do not publish the right-hand portion of email addresses.