I believe the new cheat-free credit system would be a great opportunity to introduce rewards to Rosetta to recognize contributions by users. In order for this to work, a second "internal" ranking would have to be kept and be used on the board. For the stats pages (like boincstats) the original ranking would remain (and new credits added to it as well as the new list), but for purposes of the rewards only the new ranking would apply.

Clearly rewards would have to have no monetary value (ie no physical items), be easy to award and provide a recognition that goes beyond a number below the name.

In conjucture with a couple suggestions I'd also highly recommend switching to phpbb boards and dropping this one: the massive amount of customization on them make rewarding easy - plus it'd make the forums much more user friendly.


Possible rewards:

As credits can automatically be tracked, reaching milestones could be used to award rankings visible below the name: basic stars or small proteins maybe ;)

Not sure if this is possible (maybe a phpp wiz can answer it) but you may also be able to automatically award rewards for other criterias. Say someone getting 10,000 credits in a week would give you a gold medal, 5,000 a silver and 2,500 a bronze. Top 100 on the rankings and your name turns a different color, something of that nature.

Really trivial things that just give you something "more" than the competing projects.


At a certain amount of credits (VERY high) the probably coolest reward of all would be a guided tour through the Baker lab by someone on the project team. Of course that'd not include flight/hotel and it'd have to require a LOT of credits to make it a rare occurance. Wouldn't want to waste a lot of time, but who wouldn't consider moving to a project where you had at least the chance to see what's happening first hand?

Currently there are 23 users with more than 2,000,000 credits after almost a year, so that may be a target range for something like this - more if you really don't want people to come :p


Lower credit (yet still high enough to not waste too much time on doing it) may be eligable for a custom board titles - or even an @bakerlab.org e-mail adress. (is there even such a domain? Haven't checked - just came to mind)


With so many interesting projects available on BOINC, anything "extra" we/you can offer that people are interested in would be one more reason to stop the other projects and remain here full time ;)

It may be that my proposed rewards are just too much work or no one else really finds them an incentive - maybe there'll be some feedback on the latter in this thread - and of course time spent on the actual science is much more important. But given that there're some ideas floating around and in the works already to get new users to BOINC, taking some from other projects may not be a bad idea as well... ;)

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I like that idea, especially if the award is a quality award, not a credits based award. CommunityTSC has / Find-A-Drug had such a system for low docking energy, SETI had a candidate list in the first few years which was similar.

Of course those will often combine on the same accounts as the power crunchers have a good chance to find more low-energy molecules. I haven't found any good ones yet but the project is running so there is a chance for me to find one :-)

Would look like some of those "Hacker" and "Cracker" boards, where some people think they are more important than others and look down on people, while talking rubbish. LOL!

I think it is a horrible Idea.

Certificates for milestones to give people something to remember in old age would seem much better to me.

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With only 3 PCs my self, might I humbly suggest the lab tour be random? Or make other ways to earn it... like creating posts that are voted as highly informative or helpful? Or attracting the most new users to the project? Or bringing the best ideas for approaches to solving the structure problem to the Baker team? ...Love the lab tour idea. But I'd think you'd need to keep it down to like 5 people on same day every 6 months or something.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Pineapple mentions the lowest energy award,

We do have it here (a news announcement and sometimes there are some in the top predictors area)

But a nice printable/screen grabable certificate always seems to go down nice, certainly did at FaD
i.e. After we had crunched the mollecule by the virtual docking to determine if the had Anti-whatever (Cancer / HIV / ...) the National Institute of Health would take the ones showing anti-... properties by the program and test them in the labs. If you happend to be a lucky one and it was your mollecule then hey you'd get a certificate to say so :-)

Such as http://stats.find-a-drug.biz/certify.php?Nickname=FluffyChicken&CertType=6&Size=Default
Though it doesn't say wich query (target protein structure like we have here 1FYI / 1CEI ) it wasn't to hard to find out. Of coure here I'd like them to add that as well ;-)

I think this would be more useful when we move to the HIV testing thing they mentiond a while back. Though you could also do it for lowest energy/... for each target as well.

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Team mauisun.org

With only 3 PCs my self, might I humbly suggest the lab tour be random? Or make other ways to earn it... like creating posts that are voted as highly informative or helpful? Or attracting the most new users to the project? Or bringing the best ideas for approaches to solving the structure problem to the Baker team? ...Love the lab tour idea. But I'd think you'd need to keep it down to like 5 people on same day every 6 months or something.

OMG, I have a flash back to the green star discussion over at Seti. The green star was implemented to reward moneydonors, and suddenly all kind of requests of colored stars popped up. There was even suggestions with long list of icons of different colors to reward postnumbers on the NC board, postnumbers in Q&A, numbers of articles to the BOINC Wiki, etc.

And the discussions of who is better than who flared up, were moneydonors better and more entitled than others, etc. .

I think we already have enough of this with the RAC.

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[b]"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me[/b]

Hmmm... Not too sure about handing out "gold stars" to people who participate, but definately printable certificates for those who perform certain feats (ie. lowest energy predicted for whatever strain, reaching 100K+, etc.). I'm not interested in recieving anything, but it would definately encourage others to eithor sign up, or participate even more.

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There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Hmmm... Not too sure about handing out "gold stars" to people who participate, but definately printable certificates for those who perform certain feats (ie. lowest energy predicted for whatever strain, reaching 100K+, etc.). I'm not interested in recieving anything, but it would definately encourage others to eithor sign up, or participate even more.

You mean something comparable to this over @Seti?
I agree, it seems to be fun to have this. I'd recomend this to all projects.

The "Top Predictions" is already there, but it could of course be combined with some fancy certificate.

Hmmm... Not too sure about handing out "gold stars" to people who participate, but definately printable certificates for those who perform certain feats (ie. lowest energy predicted for whatever strain, reaching 100K+, etc.). I'm not interested in recieving anything, but it would definately encourage others to eithor sign up, or participate even more.

You mean something comparable to this over @Seti?
I agree, it seems to be fun to have this. I'd recomend this to all projects.

The "Top Predictions" is already there, but it could of course be combined with some fancy certificate.

Yeah, something similar to that. Definately can see something like that across other projects as well. Would be nice for the participants.

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There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary, and those who don't.