Folding Forum

Is there a way to see a history for my account to see which projects I've contributed to and how much?

The donor info page only shows a Total Score (what is it?) and the number of work units complete. Clicking them doesn't take me to more in-depth info as I would have expected, but to some strange "certificate"...

I don't know of any web site that keeps track of your folding history to that level of detail. The EOC stats page shows more than the donor info page, but doesn't show the individual projects you've contributed to. The only way I know to keep track of that is to run something like HFM.NET on your local PC, which will monitor your folding clients & keep a history of every WU you've done.

This is the local forum thread on HFM.NET.

FAH discontinued the detailed personal history that was once available (many years ago). The DB searches were killing its ability to keep track of everbody's points. You have to track your own history now.

This is a real shame from an outreach/growth perspective. It's an obvious thing people want to be able to see - what have I contributed to?

It's a great project, but it seems like it really needs some UX lovin' to make it more interesting/accessible to the general public.

When you say track your own history, is there an easy way to do this? Are my log files stored locally where I could pull this info out of them?

It would be nice to have at least some history of the work units that I have completed. Just the project # they were for.

It doesn't need to be a searchable database. My stats on WUs and points are stored and visible online. It seems like quite the simple addition to show a list of the projects those WUs were for.

There is a third party app, HFM.net, that will collect this kind of data for you. I recall it collects the estimated points if that is close enough.

Your log file and up to 16 previous log files are stored on your system. Directions for locating them depending on which OS you are using and more are in this Welcome topic.

There is also an API for communicating with the client software, description of it is on GitHub if you want to roll your own solution and collect this kind of information. It also is there for third parties to write alternatives to FAHControl or the Web Control.

I installed HFM.net, but couldn't get it to recognize my F@H.

There's a support thread for HFM on the forum.

Looks like there was an update a couple days ago and it seems to be working now. Still would be nice to simply add Projects/WU count to the stat page.

vica153 wrote:Looks like there was an update a couple days ago and it seems to be working now. Still would be nice to simply add Projects/WU count to the stat page.

I agree, it would be very nice and I wouldn't have to spend so much time of my day to track all of my folding projects. However, as Bruce said, tracking stats by WU for each user was removed years ago because the queries to the database were actually causing problems with just saving the stats in the first place. Without either turning the stats server and supporting infrastructure into an absolute beast (and therefore costing a ton of money to run and maintain), or spinning up an additional server(s) to handle the extra processing power required, tracking that information and letting users query for it is just outside the means of the current infrastructure (and presumably budget too). The effort lately has been getting enough servers spun up and supporting infrastructure in place to handle the large surge of new and returning folders which has been a hell of an effort, yet slowly enough things are catching back up!

I get it. The infrastructure to support the actual purpose of F@H is more important than a silly stats page.

My issue with the current stats/points system is that it doesn't accurately reflect work done. I understand the point system is just a psychological trick to give people the urge to fold more. The speed bonus points encourages people to use better cards and increases the computing power of the project. I am not immune to the urge to get more points just for the sake of more points. However, the fact is that the purpose of F@H is to contribute value data to research projects and the points are irrelevant. WU count is hard to conceptualize without more details about the total number, size, time per unit and even then I'm not sure it would be that impressive. A stat more relatable to work done would be nice. If its known how much computing power a given WU takes to complete, then adding up that stat for the WU doesn't seem any more difficult than adding up the "points" total.

Though after thinking about that idea... it may be the case that the average individuals computing contribution, when displayed in something more understandable, would be more obviously tiny and discourage some people from folding more. Maybe just stick to Project # and WU count.

The lack of in-depth stats and history is my biggest gripe with Folding@Home. I know the team has more important things to work on, and this is just a wishlist item. But if I could...

• See a list of the all the WUs I've ever completed and the projects I've helped
• See my WU and point numbers graphed over time and see how it's improved and the work I've contributed
• See these things in aggregate for the whole project and how it has changed and improved over time, and the marvellous scale of the work that's being done

It would give me a great sense of pride and accomplishment. Fans of the old SimCity games, Factorio, and other management simulators know the feeling of building something great and just watching it hum away. That's why people put thousands of hours into those games. For a certain type of person, it's very gratifying.

Before you tell me, I know that this is not the point of the project. Science is not a game, and neither is Folding@Home. But there is a reason why people spend thousands of hours playing those games, and if Folding@Home can push those same psychological buttons and motivate people to invest time in it, that can only benefit the project.

It may not even require much effort on the FAH team's part to facilitate this. Third-party projects like EOC and HFM have demonstrated that the demand, willingness, and skill to create these things exists in the community. What impedes this effort is the limited amount of stats data that Folding@Home makes available, and the complete lack of historical data unless one has been archiving their log files or polling the API and squirrelling it away for years.

If Folding@Home did something as simple as making available complete periodic data dumps of team and donor information, I guarantee that people would create the fancy stats dashboards and trackers for those who are into that sort of thing.

All Folding@Home would have to do is publish a page with a daily JSON (or CSV or XML, it really doesn't matter) dump, and an archive of dumps for every year that data exists for. If it loads the servers too much, do what HIBP did for their compromised password hash dumps and ask CloudFlare or other CDN provider for some goodwill help and/or publish torrent files with a webseed and let P2P pick up the slack (and they would; there are whole communities dedicated to this sort of thing). Magic would happen. Don't think that you'd have to spend a ton of time and effort on this to make it worthwhile. Just look at what tools the community has managed to create even without your help.

I think you'll find some graphs you're looking for on 3rd party sites like EOC : https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/

toTOW wrote:I think you'll find some graphs you're looking for on 3rd party sites like EOC : https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/

Yup. EOC has some. But there are limitations. For example, they only track individuals if they are part of a top 800 team. Granted, this is a limitation imposed by the operator of that website. Someone else could create a website without that limitation.

But therein lies the problem: one could not create another website like that unless they have been archiving the stats from FAH for a long time.

If FAH made historic dumps available, anyone could do this. The current daily_user_summary.txt.bz2 (published every 3 hours; so 8 per day) is about 20 megabytes. Storing 8 of those every day for 20 years would amount to a little less than 1.2TB. That is admittedly a rather cumbersome size. But since the files change very little, they would probably compress to much, much less than that if combined, because the compression algorithm could reuse the same tokens across years' worth of files with mostly the same words and numbers in them.

If there were interest in this on PG's side and someone who could spare some time to do it, it could be done with relatively little cost. Of course, I'm sure everyone is spread thin as it is with the flood of new donors. But it's something to think about once we're all a little less busy.

vica153 wrote:...My issue with the current stats/points system is that it doesn't accurately reflect work done. I understand the point system is just a psychological trick to give people the urge to fold more. The speed bonus points encourages people to use better cards and increases the computing power of the project...

Just to clarify, the amount of Points Per Day you make is an accurate representation of how much science is being done. The whole reason behind bonus credits is to ensure that Science can progress at the fastest possible pace. The pace will vary for each donor but that still contributes towards the progress of science. How you keep track of that pace is via PPD.