Folding Forum

I thought that several posts in this forum were pretty clear that for bonus qualification, the username/passkey combination was used (along with the required completion percentage and initial 10 A2/A3's). To me that means that you can't use that passkey, after being qualified per the above, to get immediate bonuses with a different username.

However, a teammate has stated that he used one passkey with multiple user names and got bonuses on all. That seems contrary to the posted guidelines.

The reason for asking is that with the Chimp Challenge coming up, people are wondering how passkeys come into play. Another thread appears to indicate that multiple passkeys can be used with the same user name (though each passkey/username combo needs to be qualified separately). It would make things much easier when people switch to the common username if they could continue to use their old passkey and get bonuses immediately.

Weclome to foldingforum.org, Punchy

There should be no problem with your plan.

Feel free to test it. Set your UserName to that of someone else on your team (or to anonymous, if you'd rather) but use your own passkey. Upload one completed unit and reset everything to normal. Wait for the WU to be credited and go to http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/mai ... =userstats and enter that UserName and your passkey. Do you see the credit?

. . . or, if you may have already done that (e.g.- by accident), just enter the passkey without a UserName.

Warning: Just like the password to your PayPal account or to your on-line bank, do not reveal your passkey to anyone else.

Thanks Bruce! I tried changing the name and not the passkey and should see the results in the next update, which seems to be delayed a bit, but... if I do get the bonus immediately, then aren't a number of postings regarding passkeys and bonuses incorrect?

For example, the "quick return bonus plan qualifications" thread says "using the same passkey and fah user name combination" and "The bonus applies after you've done 10 a2 or a3 WUs provided you have used the same passkey and the same UserName on all applicable machines and provided you meet the 80% rule."

If I get a bonus immediately, shouldn't they say "using the same passkey" and "provided you have used the same passkey"? Or is the username/passkey combo only needed for the initial qualification, and from then on you could use any username with that passkey?

I guess I answered the wrong question. Maybe, maybe not. The issues may be the same and may not be the same.

I have been using my passkey for a long time and have many, many non-SMP WUs which show up in the query. (The stats query that I suggested does not tell me if 10 of them are A2/A3 WUs nor does it tell me if the 80% rule applies to any of the names so it doesn't answer the bonus question that you asked.)

I expect that we'll know for sure when you tell us whether you got a bonus with the new UserName.

No bonus...

Now I'm wondering if I can qualify the existing passkey with a new username (the standard 10 and 80%) or if qualification will only work with a new passkey generated on Stanford's page with the new username... time for more experiments.

From what has been posted by Pande Group, you should be able to qualify the new user name after completing the 10 WUs with that new name old passkey combination.

However, you appear to be the first to test and report all mannner of combinations for empirical validation. Very curious to see the results.

Interesting - when I switched back to the original username, the next A3 completed did not receive a bonus. This was all done using -oneunit so each WU was up/downloaded with the same username/passkey in case that makes a difference.

That seems to indicate that the bonus qualification database is keyed off the passkey, with the username as a secondary key, but with no duplicate keys allowed. In that case, you can only have one username qualified with a particular passkey at any one time, and if you ran 2 different usernames with the same passkey on different systems, they would never be qualified because they would keep bumping each other out of the database.

I run my SMP and GPU clients via random-folder which reconfigures a different username after each completed WU (it also uses -oneunit for this).

I've been running my clients with a passkey from the day the passkeys were introduced. I've completed more than 10 bonus qualifying WUs under all 3 usernames (myself and two teammates) with my personal passkey (registered to my username), and all three username/passkey combis get bonus points.

So your last assertion is not correct.

Your experience matches my expectations. That just leaves my last experiment in question - how could the original username have become "un-qualified"? Hopefully it was an error on my part, but running "-configonly" and changing only the username, then later seeing that WU in the statistics, doesn't leave much room for an error.

If you post the PRCG numbers for any work units in question, the mods and admins can assist in verifying points, if they are available at the time.

7im, I didn't realize you had already addressed this in another post I just ran across
viewtopic.php?f=58&t=13068#p128376
which matches smoking2000's experience.

I have now folded 12 WU using the new username and old passkey. The first 10 did not get a bonus (and I did not expect a bonus). One or two of the last two did. Could you please check the following WU results: user EVGApes, p6023, R0, C59, G13?

Switching back to my original user name, I now need to figure out why the last one I completed did not get a bonus. Perhaps I dropped under the 80% completion rate somehow but I recall no recent events to explain that. I'm going to switch one system back to the original username again and see what happens.

Punchy wrote:Could you please check the following WU results: user EVGApes, p6023, R0, C59, G13?

Hi Afterburners (team 111065),
Your WU (P6023 R0 C59 G13) was added to the stats database on 2010-02-20 04:13:01 for 475 points of credit.

This WU was submitted by someone whose IP address ends in .104. The last WUs submitted by Punchy also were submitted from an IP address that ends in .104. Are you sure you submitted that WU as username EVGApes? Seems like a strange coincidence.

Oops, sorry, I switched to that new name before doing the 10 qualifiers and additional work.
I have confirmed by watching the deltas between stats updates using my passkey as the only search term that I am getting the bonus for WUs after that one.
Thanks for checking!

Just curious, what kind of hardware config(s?) are you using to send in 10 - 12 WUs that fast?

2 dual-socket Xeon systems. They can pump out A3's pretty quickly.

I have confirmed that 2 more A3 WU's just sent in using my original username and passkey did not get any bonus. Unfortunately, since there aren't any tools available for users or even mods to check on completion percentage (as far as I know, anyway), I'm not sure there is any way to conclusively say what's happened. Either there is a bug that caused my original username/passkey to become "unqualified" the instant that I started using a new username/old passkey, or somehow my completion percentage dropped below 80% at that exact time. Since I have 36 WU's completed with that combo, most A2/A3, and can only recall 1 failure, it seems unlikely that I have 7 non-completed WU's, but maybe something is happening behind the scenes that I have not noticed.