There are a number of reasons why Volunteers give up their time, machines and pay high electricity prices in order to support your project. Some project managers spend a lot of time in maintaining the project and communicating with their user database. Unfortunately, there are some who do not appear to care about their users and fail to advise them of what is going on.

The purpose of the thread is to appeal to those project managers that do not make good use of the provided "NEWS" option in the BOINC project software to keep the user base up to date of project developments. Short items could be posted here of impending Downtime's necessary for maintenance, Work Unit issues like impending shortage due to implementation of new ones or cessation of issue of WU's due to some reason. The positive of using this method of Communication is that users can make good use of the RSS feed option and be warned to adjust their machines accordingly, rather than be idle and just give money to the Power Companies. It is understood that some Project have not updated their software for some time for a variety of reasons. It is also known that some projects have altered the software for their own needs and use of this feature might not be available or incompatible. If that is the case, than please consider alternative methods of communicating. For example there is the option to use the "Notices" whereby users get notified by the provided option in the BOINC Software they are using. Failing that, there is also the option to write a short email of impending issues to either the Official BOINC Forum or BOINCStats. Consider that information of a general nature posted in your Message Board might be hidden and gets lost amongst a multitude of other issues that is written in a Message Board and is time consuming to read all the posts of all projects.

Whilst I can not speak for anybody else, I can say this. The cost of Electricity is going up and up and it is not sustainable any longer to just set and forget a number of projects. One need to choose carefully which project you wish to follow and why. Obviously, if the Project Managers do not spend much time in talking to their user database and keeping them current as to what is going on in their project than they are likely to loose support from me and other like minded users. I appeal that you review the amount of time and method you use to communicate with your users. I might even be blunt..If you have no time to talk to us than you do not deserve our support.

Great point. Along the same lines, I know I would like to hear more about progress each project has made. Volunteers want to know what they are helping accomplish and it feels good to hear more about it. We can also use project successes to recruit more volunteers. I got a lot of traffic on Reddit posting about the Clean Energy Project's recent news.


https://twitter.com/VolunteerComp

... we now are writing the year 2017 ...

I can only agree to your appeal!
Hasn't helped much, I guess.
It's a pity.

The question is: Is it a "cost" or "time" (or both) factor on the project-hoster/admins/mods/ side.
They will not admit it, since it might effect their reputation - but just letting projects "hang around" harms more than shutting down
the whole "thing".

I could name a few projects that are wasting MY time and costs!

Anyway, to all reading this up to this line: Have a nice time crunching on serious projects.

Name and shame them!