UK BOINC Team Forum

In order to avoid a repeat of the little problem I had yesterday, (concerning sending out emails to all members), I've had a long think about this situation.

In general, the people who need to be advised the most about team related affairs and issues are really those who are the most active Team members and (mostly)  these are already Forum members.

So, I've come up with a plan.

Apart from the next announcement, which will advise non-forum members about this decision, all future emails will only be sent to forum members.

This will save time and the possibility of creating "another" problem. It also serves a useful purpose that means that we won't be emailing people who are either inactive or who don't want to receive emails in the first place. (Edit: And it's also a way of boosting forum memberships !!)

As a result, I'll also make a change to the "text" on each projects "Team page", recommending members to join the forum, if they want to be advised regularly of "Team events".


There IS perhaps something to be gained by doing "email broadcasts" to generate more interest across all the projects, by using the email addresses provided by our members when they join each project.

But it's clear that the burden to collect, sort and then whittle down (so no-one gets a duplicate) an ever increasing number of email addresses (1325 from 22 projects - which all have to be collected on the day of the broadcast, in order to include the latest new members), means that there is a high degree of pressure to get this done quickly and hence there's a greater risk of mistakes being made.

And rather than burden non-active people with more junk emails, I think it's better to concentrate our limited resources on members that will both benefit from and appreciate our efforts the most.


Hope no one has a problem with this!

regards,

Tim

UBT - BHCJackie wrote:Is there a way for the Forum to generate an announcement email like it does for notifications of new posts to a watched thread? If the Forum could send an announcement or inform all members of a new announcement it would save time on collecting edreses and emailing. It makes sense in my head but it ain't coming out right in type.

That's exactly the facility we will be utilising in future....!

regards,

Tim

Tim
Do you have any idea how many people actually took part in Crunch1 as opposed to saying they would take part?
I would've thought we had more take part in the crunch than said Yes, I'm in before the effent.
If thats true then stopping the emalis could have a negative effect (on crunches anyway).
Is there anyway to do an opt out for emails (or opt in), so if someone doesn't want to know about crunches etc you can exclude them.
I realise the emails are time consuming for you and a pain to do but I think they are beneficial and its not as though your bombarding us with em is it.

UBT - AJS wrote:Tim - Do you have any idea how many people actually took part in Crunch1 as opposed to saying they would take part? I would've thought we had more take part in the crunch than said Yes, I'm in before the effent. If thats true then stopping the emalis could have a negative effect (on crunches anyway). Is there anyway to do an opt out for emails (or opt in), so if someone doesn't want to know about crunches etc you can exclude them. I realise the emails are time consuming for you and a pain to do but I think they are beneficial and its not as though your bombarding us with em is it.

Hi John,

At least 17 members said they would crunch SETI specially - and as SETI has the largest team membership, so there would be quite a few others who don't crunch for anyone else.

But look at these results for some startling graphs:


see the following links for graphs of SETI credits over the last two months - see the "hike" just after Feb 25, when the SETI credits started to be validated and issued...!

http://www.teamocuk.com/cteamcred.php?s ... H&t=112288

And see here for the graph of the increase in active hosts (especially)

http://www.teamocuk.com/cteamhost.php?s ... H&t=112288

(we went from around 220 upto 300+ for the weekend !!)

So, we are borne out that the Crunch is a good thing...

Hopefully the same will happen with Einstein.


The problem is collecting the email addresses from each project individually and then "parsing" them to extract each email address just the once and to then filter each one dependant on whether they want to be be in or out....!

It wasn't so bad when we had 150-200 members and only three or four active projects.

But now we have 450 members (and still growing fast) and over 20 projects.

And the projects don't make it easy for "founders" to collate all this stuff together - it's not like they allow you (as founder) to export a list of addresses in excel format...! That's what makes it more difficult.


There might be a slight loss if we don't email directly, to "all and sundry"....

But it ain't going to be easy, collecting sorting and parsing 2000, 3000 or more email address from all the projects - which we have to do, in order to email 100% of ALL team members....!

Think it better if people join the forum and then we can easily send out emails.

If needs be, I might even set up a few hundred "dummy accounts" with non-forum members email addresses in - it'd be a lot simpler....than the current method !


regards,

Tim