Some Anandtech Users Quit Formula BOINC

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Deleted member 268674

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Hey guys,
I come into this not really clear on your relationship with Formula BOINC, but wanted to let you know that some of the top producers on the Anandtech team are quitting Formula BOINC. Recently there have been credible allegations that one or more of the new Formula BOINC (FB) committee members have used their position of privilege to unfairly benefit their team. Unfortunately, many of the incriminating posts have been scrubbed from the FB forum, as a FB committee member has been granted full control over the forum. Some of us have been talking about forming a new BOINC competition to help spur interest in DC. I'm not here as a salesman, just for my own personal curiosity to see where the general sentiment lies here at [H] regarding FB and the possibility of an alternative contest structure. Your thoughts are welcome!

Link to FB forum:
https://formula-boinc.org/forum/
 
Hey guys,
I come into this not really clear on your relationship with Formula BOINC, but wanted to let you know that some of the top producers on the Anandtech team are quitting Formula BOINC. Recently there have been credible allegations that one or more of the new Formula BOINC (FB) committee members have used their position of privilege to unfairly benefit their team. Unfortunately, many of the incriminating posts have been scrubbed from the FB forum, as a FB committee member has been granted full control over the forum. Some of us have been talking about forming a new BOINC competition to help spur interest in DC. I'm not here as a salesman, just for my own personal curiosity to see where the general sentiment lies here at [H] regarding FB and the possibility of an alternative contest structure. Your thoughts are welcome!

Link to FB forum:
https://formula-boinc.org/forum/
Thanks crashtech for stopping in. Some of the more active members have been keeping tabs on this in our Slack channel. I can tell you that many of us agree with the allegations we have seen thus far. The steering committee appears to have either been thrown together last minute with individuals that haven't really put much thought into things or really don't have a clue on what they are doing. Most of the complaints still existing are complaints that have been brought up many times before over the course of years. For active BOINC members to claim they had no idea ODLK was a poor choice for a sprint is either a sign of their incompetence or a blatant lie. I saw Timbo's attempts at justification for the actions the committee took and it was certainly a long stretch. Megacruncher avoiding all public communication is smart on his part as there is no possible way he could prove any innocence in the matter and it would only give documented evidence for future conflict. I'm not a fan of Natalia as many volunteers (and also admins she has worked with from my understanding) but the way they interacted with her, the project, and tried to avoid accountability has made me actually come to a level of agreement with her on this.

Removing Gridcoin was just one bad decision as the justifications for it is stupid. Remove the largest team because... insert bias... and then claim it is in the best interest of the community. Gridcoin officially takes the stance of not participating on any event they aren't directly invited to because of the hate, ignorance, and behaviors of the BOINC community towards them since their inception. It is dumb to use any argument of "their lack of interest or involvement" because it was caused by the same idiots that voted them out. Every team has miners on them from a realistic standpoint. Good luck pulling all of them.

I mention Gridcoin because after they were removed members of the teams very verbal at voting them out went and started trying to recruit Gridcoin members to join their teams. Hypocrisy is what it is. I'm not going to indulge in proving all cases of offense as it has been beaten to death already. Simply, certain teams are extremely shady and claim they are in it for the good but are blatantly in it for their own greedy entertainment.

[H] officially decided as a team to not partake in Formula-BOINC this year as we as a team tend to discuss it each year. I have brought up many issues with the event each year and it has fallen on deaf ears. sebastien has very little interest in the event and he is the one "hosting" it. If he won't make any real attempt to make things better, then it is a lost cause. Some of the problems people bitch about cannot be fixed easily if at all. Unless the project is hosting the event, there is really very little control over matters. I would love to hear the proposal TAAT has for a new event and how they would envision it. With DC-Vault dead, all we have to look forward to is Seti-Germany events, PrimeGrid challenge series and a few one offs here and there. However, I have a feeling any events that are thought up will pretty much just recycle the same projects already in the mentioned remaining events. There really are only a few projects that are capable of such a "sprint-like" event.
 
I had originally thought to sit this years FB out for various reasons, but then i got kind of nostalgic and decided to participate at least to a certain extent.
I didn't really look too deep at the specifics of the cheating accusations but it does seem troubling to me that someone who has advance warning of what the project is could somehow claim they were just "making educated guesses". If anything a member who has advance warning should be going out of there way to make sure they are NOT crunching a project they know will be chosen, even if they happened to already be doing it before they knew it was the sprint. This is what I would expect of someone who has that level of leadership within the contest. You absolutely need to appear above reproach. I also feel the response from certain people is like "what you couldn't get work? get good scrub! " and they don't really seem to understand the concept of a fair competition and good sportsmanship. Where is the fun in a sprint if you use tactics to suck up all the work and leave others unable to compete? Guaranteed some of them knew there was not enough work and they rushed to vacuum up all they could despite that. All in all however this is not new and I didn't really expect those attitudes to change. I am a bit concerned about the whole concept of the sprint committee and its small concentrated power. Why couldn't they just fix whatever was causing the stupid python errors and keep the random project picker? How is it so hard not to pick a project that sucks so bad as a sprint candidate?
I feel more inclined to believe this was not an "oops". At the end of the day I really like a lot of things about FB and how it helps out a variety of projects that might not get much support, and I am not sure I want a couple of bad apples to ruin it for me however much i choose to participate. Then again It doesn't appear that we [H] are even close to being competitive this year so that is part of my whole "meh" take on this. I will probably keep going for a while and see how it all pans out. Its not like this is preventing me from crunching projects i like or getting good work done for the science and I don't really want to allow myself to get too wound up about it as that is another "win" for some of these people.

I absolutely saw posts getting deleted and I think that should NEVER happen. If there is a problem with a poster then either talk it out directly or if that fails give personal warning and potentially cut off access (and still keep their posts up). Deleting posts just looks bad all around to me and should really only be done if someone is doxing or doing something blatantly illegal.

As for your mentioning potentially creating more events / contests / series... Heck yeah make it happen and I will show up!
 
I'm going to try to stay out of this one, but I had to at least mention that I found it pretty funny when there were heated exchanges back and forth, left and right, and motqalden just stops in with a "Y'all got any more of that ODLK?" meme. :ROFLMAO:
You know if you can't enjoy what you are doing it's time to do something different. I thought the situation deserved some levity.
 
Yep mot, I agree. In the government, they have a similar rule. Not only can you not have a 'conflict of interest', you cannot have 'the appearance of a conflict of interest'. It is a much higher bar for when maintaining confidence in the process is critical (such as contract negotiations).
 
Thanks for all the responses! I might be getting the cart in front of the horse, but some ideas about an alternative competition are being kicked around on our secondary forum, teamanandtech.org. I don't think there's a thread about it there yet, but there probably will be when it gets fleshed out a bit more. It's probably going to take a while to implement, but I'm sure that incorporating suggestions from all interested teams would be a top priority. It's nice to see that there's at least some interest here among one of my favorite teams!
 
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