What happened to Einstein@Home in December 2018?
25 Aug 2021 22:11:40 UTC
Topic 225905
(moderation:
What happened to Einstein@Home in December 2018?
" target="_self">BOINCstats for Einstein@Home showing dramatic dropoff in users
Was this when the Covid-19 Pandemic hit? What happened at Einstein@Home? I can't believe that it lost the number of people, 468k down to 3.7k users, in just one month because of a virus that wasn't recognized as a pandemic yet.
George
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
Looks more like an error or
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Looks more like an error or change in the calculations. What certainly didn't happen is that 400k (mostly inactive) users suddenly bunched up on a single day to collectively delete their account ;)
My guess: Some variable changed, no one fixed it, resulting in errors and the corresponding default "0 users".
Well we started this new
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Well we started this new website in 2016 and then in 2018 this
https://einsteinathome.org/content/new-gdpr-compliant-website-features-and-statistics-export-option
MAGIC Quantum Mechanic
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I understand the making of a new website, but I don't understand the complete dropoff of so many users. And even if so, I would think that if we had that many users in (at least) Einstein, then slowly they would have gradually come back when they realized what they needed to do. But... they haven't even come close to returning to 400k+.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
I think if you look at the
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I think if you look at the user count for all projects, you will see a similar dropoff.
I attribute it to both GDPR and also the end of Seti.
Lots of people quit all distributed computing projects when Seti ended. Many had auxiliary, backup projects for the regular Tuesday data outages at SETI.
So when Seti ended, they simply turned off the BOINC client. Presto chango, dramatic drop in BOINC participants at all projects.
The percentage of all INACTIVE users is much greater than the ACTIVE users at all projects. Look at the pie charts for any project.
I can see a proportionate
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I can see a proportionate dropoff due to GDPR, but the dropoffs occurred over a period of a couple of months, and not all projects had a dropoff. Specifically, Milkyway did not, and yet Einstein and Universe did, though not at the same time. And didn't SETI officially end with BOINC on Mar 31, 2020?
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
Yes, you are correct in the
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Yes, you are correct in the Seti timeline. But Seti was hemorrhaging users well before then when people got discouraged with the Linux only special sauce application and felt their Windows hosts couldn't compete, so why bother.
Also lots of projects did some housecleaning clearing out old dormant accounts to reduce the participant databases.
Einstein was one of the first to do so.
So did Universe. Users Overview
LHC Users Overview
Climate Prediction Users Overview
Number Fields Users Overnview
User numbers didn't drop off,
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User numbers didn't drop off, but stats exports did. Einstein was one of the few projects which introduced a specific opt-in requirement under GDPR. Inactive users disappeared from the exported user list overnight, and many active users took a while to cotton on - we still see threads here from users asking where their stats have gone.
I guess this pretty much sums
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I guess this pretty much sums it up for when GPDR was becoming active and BOINC was "reorganizing" itself:
I just didn't realize how many inactive users there were until now.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association