I\'ve been a participant in the Climate Prediction experiment for almost two years now, almost as long as there has been a Linux client available, and yet I don\'t really feel part of a \'community\'.

It\'s obvious that some kind of community exists, with dozens of forums with hundreds of posts, but I\'m not particularly keen on forums and tend not to participate on a regular or ongoing basis (I\'m more a usenet and email lists sort of person!), and tend not to have the time to devote to following forums properly.

One thing that would make me feel more like part of a community, and which would help to reassure me that using my computer in this way is actually doing some real good, would be if there were a regular Climate Prediction email newsletter.

Not frequent, once a quarter, or once a month at the very most, but it would be useful to be informed (without having to go and search) how the experiment was progressing, what useful results had been calculated, and so on.

Is there such a newsletter that participants can subscribe to, or, if not, are there any plans to introduce one?

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Is there such a newsletter that participants can subscribe to, or, if not, are there any plans to introduce one?

No newsletter, and no plans for one.
Bulk email is a \'dirty word\' - it leads to having the servers blacklisted, and happened to the project in the early days.

Communication is via the php board here.

There is a project status page here where you can see how it\'s all progressing.
Just bookmark it and have a look when you need the info.

The \'project news\' page is also good, take a look at the \'open day 2006\' webcasts.

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
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Is there such a newsletter that participants can subscribe to, or, if not, are there any plans to introduce one?

No newsletter, and no plans for one.

Uh, ok, then. :-(

Bulk email is a \'dirty word\' - it leads to having the servers blacklisted, and happened to the project in the early days.

It seems bizarre that the project was blacklisted. There\'s nothing illegal about *opt-in* mailing lists. It\'s a perfectly normal use of email. It sounds perhaps as though a mass email was sent out without confirming with one\'s upstream provider that the hosting arrangements were geared up to handle this, and they then took fright?

However, there\'s absolutely nothing to stop the project from operating an announce-only mailing list via a third-party service provider, such as YahooGroups, etc, if there are difficulties using one\'s own upstream.

I\'m disappointed that there seems to be reluctance to do this. I\'m sure this would be welcomed by many participants. If the project were to send out periodic informative emails (to opted-in users), I\'m sure it would be well-received and would help to boost awareness of developments in the project\'s work.

I mean, commercial websites send out (opt-in) update emails to registered users often enough (which often actually aren\'t particularly of interest), so it seems only sensible for a project that people do really have a genuine interest in to offer the same courtesy service to its users.

Communication is via the php board here.

That\'s another issue. Why does the project have no less than three separate forum systems in operation? It\'s confusing as to which has priority and where one should look for announcements.

\"Go find it yourself\" also isn\'t particularly \'customer-friendly\'. I can easily remove my processing power (such as it is) if I feel the project isn\'t actually achieving any useful objectives. ;-(

There is a project status page here where you can see how it\'s all progressing.
Just bookmark it and have a look when you need the info.

Thanks for the link. However, I just looked.. and it\'s just numbers. It needs a deep understanding of the science behind the project to read anything into that. If the project is to maintain public interest (and concern about climate change) it needs to be translating its findings into simple language that can be understood by non-specialists, and releasing newsworthy findings or developments on a regular basis. It would be a simple task to do the courtesy of emailing opted-in users the same news releases (and/or other information useful to participants, eg, new BOINC releases, the launch of new models, etc) as and when news releases are being added to the website.

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The \'project news\' page is also good, take a look at the \'open day 2006\' webcasts.

Thanks for that. I did actually have a look around there a little earlier. That kind of information certainly seems like a step in the right direction (although, for example, an email to opted-in members saying \"Hey, we\'ve done this, you might want to have a look..\" would certainly have gone down well with me).

Pet peeve time, though:
CPDN uses the open-source cross-platform BOINC software, and benefits from the hard work of the BOINC developers who selflessly share their work so that others may benefit.
The least CPDN could do in return is make its video available in an open format that we can *all* access.

The closed-format <spit> Windows Media codec that it uses can\'t be handled by my operating environment, all I get is the sound (which is at least better than the nothing I often get with Windows Media files, I guess).

Couldn\'t Somebody Official take a few minutes to convert the files to MPEG or OGG or similar?

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It seems bizarre that the project was blacklisted. There\'s nothing illegal about *opt-in* mailing lists. It\'s a perfectly normal use of email. It sounds aperhaps as though a mass email was sent out without confirming with one\'s upstream provider that the hosting arrangements were geared up to handle this, and they then took fright?
...

I think it\'s a case of \'once bitten, twice shy\'. The project had such a bad experience the first time that they\'re likely never to try again. Apparrently some of Oxford Universities mail servers are still on blacklists, years later...


PS Apologies for \'apparrently\' since I\'m sure it\'s misspelt, but I\'ve only had 5 hours sleep in the last 60 hours and I can\'t figure it out.

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ