Folding Forum

Covid caused a huge increase in people doing folding@home, which is cool. But I don't understand why they're still going. Shouldn't they have given up by now? People generally give up on new things after a short time. The level of dedication I'm seeing confuses me.

Damnit, new people. Give up like you're supposed to.

Many have given up, but it seems quite a few have decided to stick with it, I am also surpised (and pleased) at how many are staying

In late Feburary F@H had about 14,000 volunteers.

By early April, 175,000.

Now, in late June 80,000 volunteers

So CaptainHalon, over half have quit.

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... ary.php?s=

Then click Active Users, Weekly

(Then, if you click Points, Weekly you see that even while volunteers were going down, Points Per Week were still rising until recently)

No WU available

Don't know what you are talking about. There is no WU shortage anymore. Except a rare server issue occurs again.

In summer time it is expected that many users shutdown their PC because of heat and extra power cost for air condition.

I hope in autumn we get to 100k users again when summer heat is over and 2nd corona wave strikes

I am aware that there might be some GPU WU shortages but additional work is in the pipelines so you will see more GPU Projects soon

CaptainHalon wrote:Covid caused a huge increase in people doing folding@home, which is cool. But I don't understand why they're still going. Shouldn't they have given up by now? People generally give up on new things after a short time. The level of dedication I'm seeing confuses me.

Damnit, new people. Give up like you're supposed to.

I know for myself that I actually thought I had stopped doing it. But as F@H starts up with Windows, apparently I had been folding for weeks and I hadn't even noticed. Sorry!

NathanJanssens You are allowed to fold by accident, the help toward a treatment still counts!

NathanJanssens wrote:

CaptainHalon wrote:Covid caused a huge increase in people doing folding@home, which is cool. But I don't understand why they're still going. Shouldn't they have given up by now? People generally give up on new things after a short time. The level of dedication I'm seeing confuses me.

Damnit, new people. Give up like you're supposed to.

I know for myself that I actually thought I had stopped doing it. But as F@H starts up with Windows, apparently I had been folding for weeks and I hadn't even noticed. Sorry!

In the Forum, I sometimes refer to the Pandemic as "The Coronavirus Wars". And it sort of is a war, between us and a very determined enemy. So far it's put about 120,000 Americans in their graves, and far, far more humans the world over in their graves. F@H gives almost every person on Earth a chance to enlist in this war. For people to enlist, and continue to fight over the long haul, you need several things. First, "medals", which our point system provides.
Second, weapons that actually work, which is what the client program does. When our "troops" hit glitches with the "weapon", and it can't be easily or quickly resolved, they become far more likely to quit the fight. Finally, our "troops" need victories to show them the fight is being won. That's the hardest part. It'll be a long time to show how the work resulted in a vaccine and/or safe, effective treatment. It'll also be a long time to come to show advances in other areas and illness.
I don't think there's much else we can do.

foldy wrote:

No WU available

Don't know what you are talking about. There is no WU shortage anymore. Except a rare server issue occurs again.

In summer time it is expected that many users shutdown their PC because of heat and extra power cost for air condition.

I hope in autumn we get to 100k users again when summer heat is over and 2nd corona wave strikes

Hi, I shut down folding on my PC because it seemed to have stopped working (and I was having heat issues.)

When I heard the news there might be a treatment (dexamethasone) I wanted to start it again. So I re installed the client.

But it says "Client: local | Connecting | Inactive" in the middle near the top in the advanced control panel.

Please, is there a WU shortage?

If it says Inactive that is a different issue. That means that FAHControl is not connecting to a background FAHClient process. The default on installation is to have that start at PC startup time, if that is unchecked you need to start it manually using the shortcut.