I agree that the word punishment neither encourages nor motivates. Fortunately I don't think it appears on any Boinc user-facing pages; I'd never seen it used before reading this email thread. It might sound more positive to talk about host quota management.
I think the problem varies so much according to project and user behaviour that it should be tackled on many fronts. And, when possible, to limit the damage at an early stage to avoid wasted computer time and electricity and user disappointment. * I like John McLeod's suggestion that a more prominent communication with users (in the case of a task known to have errored out) would be better than extra information buried in the BM messages tab. What about a dialog box like the one that appears in order to indicate that the computer cannot communicate with the internet? This would alert some users to some of the problems even if they never open their BM. * It would be helpful if after some number of failed tasks perhaps per day, week or month (to be decided by the project) an email to the user could be triggered. The text could be supplied by Boinc but should be editable by the project. The email could include a link to a forum help thread and an invitation to post and ask for advice. It should tell the user that as soon as he posts to say he's followed the advice the quota will be reenabled. I'm not sure whether the reenabling could be triggered automatically or would necessarily require the intervention of an admin. * It would also be helpful if after some number of failed tasks (again to be determined by the project) the computer's quota could be set to -1, effectively disabling further downloads. The email and quota minussing might be triggered at the same time or separately. It would be useful if the numbers to trigger both the email and quota minussing could be set per application. * The question of quota increases and reductions is also of course very important. I leave this discussion to those with experience of more projects. Mo _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
