Hello,

TL;DR: I did these things - [1. Added a new mega-host] [2. changed my email address on a bunch of projects] [3. Had to re-install on my main cruncher and re-pointed to the old data directory] - skip ahead to "Any ideas what happened?" near the bottom...

I have not been actively installing BOINC on my computers in some years now, but my desktop has been quietly churning away on projects for over a decade. I have upgraded the hardware, over time, but it is still the same Ubuntu machine that started out on version 8.04, and I just upgraded to 18.04.

That's what I'm writing about. I upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04 and, as sometimes happens, the package manager removed BOINC to try to resolve a dependency conflict, and I, not paying attention, let it do it.

So, no big deal, I reinstall BOINC, point the working directory to the custom location I have it at (files still intact) and restart the service. I open up BOINCMgr and, to my surprise, no projects are installed... OK.

So, I figure, oh well, maybe I lost a couple of workloads, lets just re-add the projects and we'll be good.

I also, on the same day, added a 16 core Xeon server that I'm not really doing anything else with - it's running on 75% cores right now, and I went out to BOINCStats to see what this is doing...

I open up the stats to reveal that my efforts have yielded -1,342,559 yesterday, dropping me from global rank 140,864 to 333,607, and decreasing my overall contribution from 1,720,471 to a meager 377,872.

What gives?

I mean, I'm not really doing this for the glory, but it is cool to see those #s go up - and I figure, with this server, I could reach 2M in a few months.

Any ideas on what happened?
Is it because I had to reinstall the software on the server?
Is it because I updated the email address on a bunch of my accounts (including the BOINCStats account)?
Because I changed the working directory (and squashed something)?

Any advice on how to get my stats back would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

--mobrien118

Admission: This is a cross-post with https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=13666 . I didn't see that BOINCStats has a forum until after I posted that... (sorry!)

Appears to be a SPLIT Cross-Project-ID (CPID).
For more details about SPLIT CPID and how to fix read the topic at the BOINC forums > Message boards : Questions and problems : CPID split

You need to use the SAME email address for ALL your projects Active, Inactive and RETIRED and here at BOINCstats.
In order to synchronize your credits the email address (and to a lesser extent User Name) must be the SAME across all projects you are signed up at even if you are not "crunching" any work on it currently.

I'm here to solve the problem, but scanning through that thread you referenced, I don't see a specific solution (or, are you simply cross-referencing the problem?)

As I mentioned, I made 3 material changes, just trying to understand which one(s) are the cause.

If the solution is simply - put everything under the same email/UN - done! I changed all of the projects to the new email address and changed my email on this site, as well. Does that mean they should all come back into scope here? If so, it did not happen today. In fact, I did not accrue any new credit at all. Does this mean the credit cannot be re-combined into my singular "account" (profile?)?

I've seen a couple places (even on this site) that seem to describe the problem in cryptic, insider terms (split CPID) - but can't find somewhere where someone who is a simple contributor can easily and quickly understand.

This seems like a strange problem - in the development world we tend to use surrogate keys to identify cross client users where there is a central database and then link foreign keys to the primary, surrogate key - not use someone's email address (a volatile identifier) as a PK. So, this whole thing somewhat perplexes me. Of course, I don't know what design considerations were taken into account, so I maybe this is inherent to the distributed nature of the BOINC universe. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, sorry if I missed something. I'll check back later and see if I can solve this problem. In the meantime, this server is really cranking out some #s!

--mobrien118

Yep, that should be enough, but it can take some days or weeks before everything is in line again. Today I see over 3 Million points on your username now

Cool!

now it seems like I have more than I remember I should have. I must have had a project or 2 missing before I even started this (which makes sense, since one or 2 projects already had my new email address).

You say "retired", too - but how can I go update my email address for "ABC@home"? The website is gone.

NOTE: If the email is not the same there is nothing you can do to sync up retired projects.

Otherwise From the menu on the left click on Sync Retired Projects so long as you have the same email address at the retired projects as your current projects they will sync up usually in a week or less.