Folding Forum

Is there any mechanism for requesting bulk provisioning of passkeys for an institution? We're looking at using a unique username for each of our departments, but the thought of requesting that many passkeys via the web interface isn't particularly attractive. I was wondering if there were other options.

Create a team and let each department request their own passkey?
That seems the easiest option if you don't want a singular passkey for the organization.

I'm not aware of any official system like that.

This all being managed and deployed centrally.

Use one or a group of passkeys and the individual department names might work just as well if you are deploying centrally. The database is just as happy storing the results that way, and might simplify things. The username used in the client does not need to match up with the one used to get a passkey mailed out.

Joe_H wrote:Use one or a group of passkeys and the individual department names might work just as well if you are deploying centrally. The database is just as happy storing the results that way, and might simplify things. The username used in the client does not need to match up with the one used to get a passkey mailed out.

if the username and key don't need to match up, then what's the purpose of asking for the username to get a passkey? My understanding from reading the FAQ was the passkey was tied to the username and the two had to match in order to get the credit/bonus.

Someone probably need to rewrite sections of that FAQ, but the person who had volunteered to maintain a lot of those pages passed away a couple years ago. Recruiting a new person may have fallen in priority during the move of F@h running out of Dr. Pande's lab at Stanford with some resources elsewhere, to now having resources mainly at 3 locations and in the cloud with Dr. Bowman of WUSTL as director.

Anyways, to a short summary of the links between usernames and passkeys:

Using the same username and email address on the request form gets the same passkey mailed out.

(This above is the main link to a username, they may have once thought about requiring each username used in the client have a passkey, and that matched up in a database, but by then usernames were not unique)

Once obtained the passkey can be used with any number of usernames entered into the client software.

Client software configured with a passkey gets bonus points for the username entered once 10 WUs are completed and returned. Each username and passkey pair as entered into the client need to do this to get the bonus.

Hope that clears it up a bit


P.S. How is St Louis? It has been years since I visited the city, father grew up there and we used to visit my grandparents who lived there until they passed away in the '70's..

Thanks for the explanation. Somebody should probably just copy that into the FAQ as is. Seriously, that ws a perfect explanation.

St. Louis is good. At least as good as anyplace is with the current situation. When all this is in the past, I definitely recommend coming out for a visit. A fair amount to do and see (a lot of them free), and we have a great dining scene (hopefully those folks can hang on).

Adding a couple more (less important) lines to Joe_H's explanation.

If you submit work without a passkey it is just a scientifically useful to the research as that completed with a passkey. You just can prove it is your personal contribution. The recorded points will be lower but not the actual scientific value. Anybody else can use the same Donor name and they'll just be added together so everybody named "John" from any department will have a shared account.