The 'Real Story' behind the stats...

[DanC]

Here's what's really happening. DPC's had 1381 participants submitting/spamming (whatever) blocks yesterday to TA's 613.

What this means is 47% of listed DPC's are submitting. Just under 27% of listed TA members.
It also means TA is a sight more efficient per user than DPC.

Since TA has 2298 listed members, this means 1685 of them are not submitting blocks. If only one half of those contributed even *some* blocks, we smack down the DPC's again since DNET won't allow any more mega-spams.

Surely there is a list of those e-mail addresses of TA members who have dropped out. That would be a list of candidates likely to start back up if for nothing else - to buffer our lead.

SETI, OGR, and others... I'd bet the RC-5 effort would be happy to lend you some cracking power after this is done, if you'll help us - even a little. This is after all, TeamAnandTech!

 

[Michael]

DanC - the DPC are a pretty good team and most posts are not trolls at all. This is a "Distributed Computing" forum, why not let everyone interested in?

Michael

 

[Engineer]

I don't mind the DPC posting here, as long as it in good taste and, as always, with smilies I enjoy posting a little *tart* on their forums once and a while

 

[DanC]

My suggestion would be a gentleman's agreement to cease and desist.
Concentrate efforts on cracking...
and - there has been PLENTY of trolling. I'll back off when they do.

 

[Ken g6]

Two, I'd like to contact those 1685 members as much as you would, but unfortunately Moose or DBaker told us that would be considered spamming.

Whatever happened to the idea of making all those using Mika's server sign up for a mailing list, though? How about making an interactive stats sign-up page (if there isn't one already that I don't know about ) with a checkbox to not be included on our mailing list?

 

[DanC]

Now we're starting to think outside the box a bit.

and... is it spamming if a personal message is written to each? I think not. I'd maintain that was recruiting no?

 

[mindless]

Dan,

Do a search in the archives for this same idea. There was even a letter drafted up, but I think it was Moose who said that would be a very bad idea and told us they would not be happy with us if we did that. As much as I like the idea, its not something we could use unfortunatly.

 

[osmo]

DanC-

mindless is pointing you in the right direction on this one. Take a look back in the archives and you'll see quite a few threads on this. I admire your enthusiasm. However, accumulating a list of contacts from an email list and sending them an unsolicited message, "personal" or not, is spamming.

 

[DanC]

Well, I suppose there's always telepathy.
Seems pretty bizarre not to be able to contact non-actives.

 

[Engineer]

I wonder how many of the non-actives are actually active, only under a new e-mail? The non-actives are a really small number compared to the size of this boards membership...Something to think about..

(I know that there are about 30 DPC on the membership, but they don't count)...

 

[DanC]

Engineer,
My reference was specific to dnet. We're listed as having 2298 members - but only 613 submitted blocks. I don't know about you, but I've had the same e-mail address for over 3 years. Seems strange that so many would abandon theirs.

There's too much tendency to label everything these days as "spam" - if you get down to it, ANY advertising in any media for any reason is spam.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with posting to Usenet comp groups.

 

[BurntKooshie]

Danc - I had thought of this quite awhile ago, wrote up an email that was to be sent out to everyone on D.net TA who hadn't sent in blocks in X-many days (I think the idea was 30 days). We were shot down by D.net. We could have done it anyway. But then d.nets disposition towards us would have been pretty poor...

Ask Russ about it. He both read it, and liked it. Unfortunetly, even using the list from mika's (yeah, we thought of that too ) was frowned upon by d.net.

If I had a copy of the email I wrote, i'd send it to you, however, I deleted the final revision, as it seemed that it was an impossibility.

(I even rewrote one for the S@H guys to send out if they wanted, but it too was decided against due to the reaction of the d.net guys).

 

[RaySun2Be]

DanC,
Unfortunately, they are right. We have gone through this several times about emailing inactive Team Anandtech members. We did have a letter ready to go, and DNET squashed it. As much as I disagree, I feel we need to participate in this project within their guidelines.

Now then, back to the stats discussion. There was a post concerning how DPC was #1 in the dailies, one small country, against the Americans, hehe, they even threw in population stats to confuse the issue. What they failed to do in their look at those statistics, is take into account ALL of the American teams participating. If they want to compare the Nederlands to America for RC5, they will need to add up ALL of the blocks submitted by ALL American teams, then compare that to their country block submission. The results would be quite different than what they are suggesting.

Theoretically, if all the American teams joined together as a unit, that team would be unstoppable and the DPC would be a non-issue.

Now then, with that said, Dan is right. Team Anandtech (which is international in composition) needs to improve it's active member list. The members that are active are kicking DPC butt from an efficiency standpoint, but we need to improve our member list/active member ratio, as well as come up with new and innovative means of recruitment. "Thinking Outside the Box" if you will.

DanC, I'm with ya. PM me if you want to discuss any ideas, need any help implementing them, etc.. I will try to think outside the sphere and think of ways to help recruit for the team. My personal opinion is that we should focus on new members, outside of Team Anandtech. I like the idea that we support multiple projects, many are doing those for their own personal reasons, and enjoy what they are doing.

I think we can ask for help, and if any want to, that's great, and I would help return the favor, but I don't want to actively recruit/steal members from other projects, as they are trying to compete against other teams too.

New members and new assimilations is where we need to focus. We can all look for new and fun ways to recruit and assimilate!

We can either spend our time posting replies to troll posts, or we can spend our time achieving our goals.

Let's all get this thing done, so there is no question who's #1!!!

 

[CurtOien]

How about we all pitch in and give away a computer to a winner who will be chosen at random from anyone who produces for Team AnandTech during a month? We could send out a press release to other sites and to Anand and get some links in news sections that way.

 

[Russ]

Dan,

BK is right. It is a great idea, and he put together a fabulous letter. We had a lot of discussion about it; until dnet put the smackdown on us. Personally, I still see nothing wrong with it, but they make the rules.

Russ, NCNE

 

[RC]

Anyone tried this:

There are a lot of fast computers only being used for chat room talk. Just look at yahoo, excite, ...
I would think there would be a lot of recruitment potential in these chat rooms. Has anyone explored this, if so what was the result?

Placing a TA distributed computing logo on anandtech.com will never reach these people, a lot of those people do not know that anandtech.com exist.

 

[DanC]

RC - good call!

 

[PeterN]

Also there is the possibility of making a (payed) advertisement in some sort of newsletter. The choice for which one has to be good and we have to come up with some sort of plan for raising funds, but it might be worth a shot.

I have a number of advertising points for a german newsletter. Don't know when I have enough to make the advertisement, but as soon as I know more I will donate this ad-space to the team. I only need somebody who can make the ad in german (can do a rough one, but my german grammar isn't what it used to be when I left highschool 15 years ago .

BTW DAN
Mailed Russ an idea, but don't want this all over the forum before things have been worked out. Please contact him and let me know what you think of it. Email addy in my profile.

Regards, Peter

 

[RC]

DanC - Do you know of anyone that has attempted to recruit from such chat rooms? Did they have any success?

 

[Ken g6]

Is there anything wrong with collecting e-mails form people who sign up for something, though? Whenever the new server is up (?) it should be capable of running interactive stats. So we could have people sign up for these and a mailing list at the same time. (Or are you required to offer a service without forcing the customer to sign up for a mailing list?) For a little more incentive, Mika could stop doing retirements on non-interactive stats.

 

[BurntKooshie]

Ken_G6 - we had a discussion about this awhile ago too I don't recall if we ever decided upon implementing it or not, but i'm whole-heartedly for it, so long as the box to sign up for the "service" is UNCHECKED to begin with - like wolfie (who's response I still remember), I can't stand it when I have to sit there and uncheck boxes because I don't want to get spam.....

But I still agree and love the idea

 

[sciencewhiz]

Just wanted to reming everyone of dnets official policy on recruiting, before we get ourselves in trouble:
http://www.distributed.net/legal/policy.html

"spamming" either on behalf of your personal team or for distributed.net in general is expressly forbidden. Mass-posting distributed.net advertisements to unrelated newsgroups is a very bad thing. Emailing people who have not expressed a prior interest in distributed.net is a very bad thing.

I'm not pointing the finger at anyone, but we should think about the intent of the above message before we try something new.

 

[DanC]

Hey! don't point that at me! It might be loaded!

Well - if you take that statement literally, then you can't contact anyone electronically about cracking. I can't believe that was the *intent*.

I bet everyone here has e-mailed someone about it...
So - keep new ideas coming in eh?

 

[BurntKooshie]

sciencewiz We have understood the intent, infact, I read that before I wrote up the email months ago... - it did NOT state the exact conditions under which we were attempting to operate But to do so would put us in bad light with D.net. If something that I would do turns out to be bad for TA, and there was a way I could have prevented it, I would feel bad. So I deleted the email from the post so that no one else would send it out.

DanC Love yer enthusiasm Unfortunetly, its already been tried, and shot down (for good reason, though I disagree, its is a very valid point for D.net).