I think a lot, but definitely not all. Most did their homework with UpperCase in-home.
At least they restricted the Uppercases to the absolute necessary numbers, i.e. several hundred, not more.

There are probably some, but they are ridiculed rightly by the users. If they don't behave:

Those projects don't deserve to be crunched or their stats published. I hope they all vanish quite fast.

That's fine, if they don't do anything they don't steal CPU/GPU-time from worthy projects
I really don't know that much of that sort anyway.

It's as well easy to set up a project without any science, only UpperCase.
A credit total of more than a few hundred for UpperCase says a lot about the "work" done by the project team before going public.

I'm just waiting for the first user/team to set up a project with a useless app (UpperCase in disguise) just to inflate credits for him/themselves, so they get higher rankings on the combined stats sites. It's one of the reasons that those projects are not included here (so thanks to everyone making that known to me).
Unfortunately () there are other stats sites that don't care that much.

So, project in subject will be added when it does proper work.

on the other hand - pirates comes to mind, which afaik never ran anything but uppercase, hello world, a screensaver and other useless stuff..

then i suggest doing the same to BOINC Alpha Test and FreeHal (which gives ridiculus amount of credit doing nothing, it is not even using CPU sometimes....)

Pirates tests BOINC. It started life as the testbed for the Einstein@Home screen saver code and progressed into testing the BOINC infrastructure, both forums and application code. Eric has made many of his own applications to be tested there as well, all with their own new screen saver code. It specifically says that it's testing BOINC on the front page:


BOINC Alpha Test on the other hand is only running the standard Uppercase application and nothing else. It should be used for testing only, but there are plenty of people who consider it "free" credits anyway and run it constantly. Luckily its last stats dump is over 20 days old now, or the scheduler there is just disabled.

What if someone sets up a project with a useless app just to inflate credits for themselves, gets lots of credits, then starts doing useful work and you include them? The past credits from the useless app will still be there.

yup i know - that's pretty much enough of testing. i do not think boincworld is in need for more of those..

Yeah, that's a problem. In an ideal situation credits should be zeroed after initial UpperCase testing.

Fair enough, so long as the contributors are warned in advance. To take away credits after the fact is a good way to drive volunteers away from BOINC projects all together.

I think it's a risk of the early adopters. They know they step into a alpha/beta project. There should be no complaining about credit (yeah yeah, I know, no need to spell it out for me).

Expecting UpperCase Credits to stay is something no sane person can do.
Doing useless UpperCase junk is nothing worth to keep.

Then there should be no problem with any project saying so, explicitly, before hand. Right?

And for what it's worth, the admin of this project says that we *are* doing work of value to him and his new project. So if it's of value to him, it should be of value to the contributors (credits).

Where are the written rules to include projects to BOINCstats? I would like to learn from them. Then I'll know whether the project should be in the statistics or not. Rules must be uniform for all projects. Otherwise these statistics are not reliable.

arrrgh - it is ok for me to run uppercase as a startup for a SHORT while to test the installation with a limited number of attached hosts, but not as a constantly running thing.

and now the next one will show up and tries to tell me YETI is doing valuable things...

forget about that.

I agree.
BelgianBeer is a good example for a project that was in itself not absolutely useless, at least not for BOINC.be and all others involved, but as it just crunched UCs until the server ran smooth, and no real app came up, it was ogf course nevre included here. But they only had about 650 credits in total until they set up the server right, I think 1000 is about the absolute maximum "legally" possible.

Goldbach has crunched 550,000 credits of useless nonsense, that's absolutely ridiculous. This project seems to be a scam.

and of course it is showing up as usual:

Today
Name Team Results
biancaw SETI.Germany 4,244
[SG]FX SETI.Germany 2,640
HGW Planet 3DNow! 2,129
REM!X Planet 3DNow! 2,068

only missing *oland, but probably nothing to cheat in running uppercase...

It's some of the Stat's Sites themselves that forces some of us to run these Goofy Me Too Projects. Look @ Bok's Site, some time ago he started listing all the top Participants that had the most 10,000 Credit Projects on up to & including 100,000,000 Most Projects. This spawned a whole new Competition among a lot of users so every time a new Project comes along lot's of the Participants try to get as many Points as they can no matter what the Project does just so they have another Top Whatever Score @ another Project. I'm at fault doing this myself trying to keep up with the Jones but even I have my limits of endurance when a Project is run Poorly and why I stopped running Goldbach's for now at least.

thanks to whom ever BOINCstats (willy) tries hard not be part of this!

i am willing to crunch uppercase for a startup project for startup, but that's about it.

i will not waste a single cycle for a thing that is absolutely useless.

Agreed, I thought of that but forgot to mention it ...