A big start to 2013!

Look at this graph and rejoice! 

That's what happens when several members independently rediscovered the bountiful pleasures of DistRTGen. So many credits it feels like cheating. We are even gaining on UBT (very slowly - they were 5,085 million ahead of us at the beginning of the week but we've narrowed the gap to 5,080 million!). I've switched most of my apparatus onto the project which might let me pass Merlyn this year and briefly be team number one before Janos tramples me underfoot on his way to the top.

From now on I'll do mainly DistRTGen with maybe 25% for Primegrid & enough SETI & Einstein to keep them afloat in the Top 100. WCG I'm afraid I'll pretty much abandon. Getting it top 100 is realistically just going to cost too much. 

And the forums have suddenly got lively again. Happy New Year!

December Update!

I'm getting over 400 bogus accounts created every day!

FFS, why? What possible gain is there for anyone in creating these accounts only to have them deleted sooner or later. Usually later here. I'd let the total raise to over 11,000 again. But with an hour or so of Admin Carnage I've got it cut back to 8,500 with more brutal pruning due tomorrow.

The Top Hundred For Everything Drive

SETI is now 97th after an epic effort. Well done guys! All other active projects are 100th or better except for World Community Grid where at the last count we were 180th by total credit. The advent of a GPU application has helped our position a bit and I think we are now 147th by Recent Active Credit. So, much to do, but at least the situation is getting a little better.

My Situation & Priorities

The former has been damaged by my, frankly, heroically selfless, pursuance of team goals to the detriment of my personal ambitions. Clearly this statement lacks internal coherence as my personal ambitions include the realisation of team goals! But nevertheless getting SETI back in the top 100 cost me an awful lot of DistRTGen credits and as a result I have sunk to 91st in the Pantheon of BOINC Gods by TC and to a truly alarming 198th by RAC.

 I want to stay top 100 so this will be what I shall prioritise over getting TSBT to top 100 for TC for WCG. The rest of you may increase your WCG contribution as you see fit! 

Clicking hell!

The only downside of being Admin in Chief and head bottle-washer for TSBT is the Spambots and the 2-300 bogus forum accounts they create every day.  With account names like xxlkvdilss and claiming to be from exotic places like obscure Polynesian kingdoms but with links to Russian porn sites or sites selling virility medication or Gucci handbags (both, no doubt, fake) they manifestly have nothing to do with Boinc.

Now if I was seriously obsessional I'd set aside 20 minutes each day to delete all the accounts , more than 48 hours old, where there hadn't been a confirmatory email generated by a human following my instructions. But I'm not obsessional. In fact on the Human Obsessionality Spectrum I'm more at the disorganised slob end and so I tend to let the bogus accounts build up. After a few days I can't face the back-log and stop checking. And so after a couple of months I can end up with 22,000 bogus accounts! Yikes!

This is exactly the situation I found myself in just over a week ago. An hour per night of clicking away frantically has let me whittle in down to just under 15,000 bogus accounts. Possibly there might have been a few genuine accounts deleted along the way. If one of them was yours please forgive me &; post a comment below to let me know.

Who wants to be a Billionaire? I am!

Woohoo!
Earlier today I became only the second person in the team, the ninth in the UK and the 83rd in the world to manage this feat.
I'll ease off the credit whoring now and concentrate on getting SETI into the top 100.
Congrats to Janos for winning the grand competition.

A campaign & an upgrade.

After a period of relative apathy I finally resolved to do something about the smattering of projects, mainly wee ones, where TSBT has drifted out of the top 100. A bit of concerted action has sorted most of the smaller projects but also set Rosetta and SETI back on track. The full tale is here if you want to relive the excitement here.

In order to do my bit to help this drive I thought my NVidia cards could be freed up if I got a top end HD7970 GPU to churn out DistRTGen units to offset the low return SETI ones. Once seTi is safe I can then do 2.5 million per day for DisTRGen.

That's my excuse anyway.

The new site and URL has gone pretty much uncommented on. Better than a storm of protest. Probably. It took a while for google to realise we'ed moved but put TSBT into Google and we are usually on the first page of results, whereas Bing has us somewhere on page 47, if we are lucky.