I didn't know which Forum section to post this under, so I am doing it here. Feel free to move it to a topic properly. I am just smelling some trouble brewing, so some thinking & communication might be needed. I am sure you all know most of this, but I am not sure if a detail is not getting ignored.
http://atlasathome.cern.ch/forum_thread.php?id=660#6057 is an example of all CERN projects consolidating under
LHC@Home. In addition to
ATLAS@Home, other projects are moving, too:
vLHCathome and
Beauty@LHC (the latter is probably already moved since the server has been down forever, and the LHCb app is already on LHC@Home). It seems
LHChome-dev will stay where it is per
https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/forum_thread.php?id=299#4161 ("
P.S The dev project will stay around as it is." ).
(By the way, unrelated to this post: LHChome-dev is spelled as "vLHCathome-dev" here on BS,
which probably should be fixed now)
The problem is, just like mentioned in the ATLAS thread I pointed to above, there are certain things promised to the crunchers:
"
Credit will not be lost! We will move all the credit accumulated here to LHC@Home once all the remaining tasks are finished. To make this easier it would be very helpful if your email address you register with is the same on both projects, since this is the only way to match the accounts on each project."
and
"
Badges will be moved too."
Isn't this going to wreak havoc with misc statistics sites (including BOINCstats, Free-DC, etc.) as well as the
Signature for BOINC Users site? The usual "project is retired" activity will result in all those retired project credits count twice, once from the old projects in the Retired Projects category, and then from the new apps that will start their existence using those existing credits and inflate the credit for LHC@Home. And, the badges from those projects will all end up doubling.
Am I missing something here? Does this mean that retiring these projects should be done very carefully, first making sure that the credits have really been moved to the new subprojects by CERN devs, and then either delete them here (and at other stats sites) as if they never existed, or retire them but set their credit count to zero, or retire them with their credits intact to respect the history but add code to always skip them while creating future aggregate values (as relevant to the user/host/badges/whatever other context)?
Thanks
Tuna