Question To Be Or Not To Be involved in FB sprints

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Orange Kid

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
4,323
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Ok, so I guess I am the one to blame for dragging us down the FB sprint rabbit hole..........

So I have put up a pole to see if we would like to continue playing or not. It has a 7 day time limit.

There are other challenges out there to participate in. WCG has challenges from time to time as well as PG and the Pentathalon. I am sure more can be found if we look.

Votes and thoughts are welcome.
 

VietOZ

Member
Aug 3, 2019
98
139
66
@Icecold
I think you misunderstood my point. I didn't quoted, mentioned anything about what was said on FB's forum. What i meant from what I was saying ... was only from this thread.
I quoted what was said here in this thread https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...involved-in-fb-sprints.2592105/#post-40471007 highlighted with bold letters.
and again here https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...involved-in-fb-sprints.2592105/#post-40471114 also in this thread.

Maybe i chose the wrong choice of words for "accusing", but it was close. There are 25 teams in league 1 and at least the top 10 teams are active in FB. Why do you only brought us into the conversation? Because XS and TSBT are friends? What did you try to implied?

You've said you didn't call out XS publicly. Let me ask you, is this board private or public? Yet you've put us into a situation like we knew everything but didn't acknowledged it.

"Then this happens, and nobody from XS or TSBT has acknowledged it's wrong"

To me, it does sound like you want XS to admit something. I was going to stay out of all of this because I've been having a lot going on my plate with RL. But when I read that I felt like XS got pulled into the situation for no reason.

Then you brought up the team hopping.Which is a completely different conversation that could never end. I've never denied that we didn't do team hopping. In fact, I've announced which team i was going to crunch BEFORE the pentathlon started. Sure, we tried to help TSBT to beat you guys in Dec. Did we succeed? y'all won, so why not enjoy it and move on?

When 2021 started, a bunch of y'all jumped on "a team" (i won't name it) on WEP. Was it just helping out of the blue? or was it repaying the favor?
I'm sure you guys meant no harm, but since you guys kept saying we're hurting this and that. Did you guys think about when you did that, you guys officially hurted the smaller teams on league 2?
There's that silver line that sometime we as a human often overlooked.Sometime we just want to help our friends, or paying some respect or return a favor or whatever it is. But the process may never always be right. That's just one example i want to show, not particularly picking on someone or team. The Scole's story you talked about, i'll have to find out what happened.

"It's complete nonsense to think that you guys can hop between TSBT and XS on most competitions, but then when TSBT is caught with the hand in the cookie jar act like XS is a totally separate thing."
It's also funny to me that you can identified who jumped where and you can not see XS and TSBT are 2 teams? (except for Pecos's situation, most of you didn't know)

You brought up "JTFranklin (whoever he is)" ... convenient eh? so just some hero jump out of the woods? C'mon man
You can change your crunching name, you can hide your machines. But there are ways to identify who's who in this little Boinc's world.
Now, I can't say if you know him. Just like I can't say what was going on at TSBT with the Sprint. But i'm sure WE (meaning XS, TSBT and your top guys whoever recruited him or asked him for a favor) all know who he is. I don't want to put his name out because 1) i can't say it for sure 2) I don't want to drag another team into the mess. 3) it was over, done deal. Move on
A guy used his company's resources to beat us brought back memories why we team hopping in the first place. That's all i'm saying.

Now, with SV (Systemviper) and the gridcoin thing. I also want to clear up this a bit. SV is kinda new to Boinc. He's not new to XS, but he's new to Boinc. He didn't fully understand the terms "cruncher" and "miner". All he did was trying to recruited some new members for XS, which we really appreciated his efforts, but he completely messed up when he attached XS with Gridcoin. We chewed on his azz and explained things to him. Hence why you see him quiet on the FB's forum. But he's been doing a great job with his SC's position and I'm proud of him. His choice of words sometimes also quite confusing, so be warned. (shit i'm going to get chew for this ... not that I'm any better lol)
The thing I didn't like about gridcoin was their pools. I mean users spent years and years of hard crunching to archived a top spot on their favorite project. Lots of time, efforts, money were put into it. Only to be wiped out by grc pools. Not only i'm happy to see GRC removed from FB, but i also would want to see all the stats sites or Boinc put in some kind of filters to separated "user" and "group" or something. A pool or university should never be counted as a "user".


Then to this "suggest us all jumping in on Planet 3D Now". Look, i'm not going to argue about team hopping. Do what you want to do. But then don't act like you haven't done it and drag somebody else into the shit show. If you can help P3D beat us, congratulation P3D! I have no problem with that. Now let's get on with the battle.

I'll be offline for a bit to get some fresh air and rethink about what was i signed up for. Competitions or Science or eggo? Is it worth it? or just throwing money away? No worries, my machines still crunch, but i'll stay away from the forums for a while until i figure out what i want to do.

Cheers and stay safe!
 

Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
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@Icecold
Maybe i chose the wrong choice of words for "accusing", but it was close. There are 25 teams in league 1 and at least the top 10 teams are active in FB. Why do you only brought us into the conversation? Because XS and TSBT are friends? What did you try to implied?

You've said you didn't call out XS publicly. Let me ask you, is this board private or public? Yet you've put us into a situation like we knew everything but didn't acknowledged it.

"Then this happens, and nobody from XS or TSBT has acknowledged it's wrong"

To me, it does sound like you want XS to admit something. I was going to stay out of all of this because I've been having a lot going on my plate with RL. But when I read that I felt like XS got pulled into the situation for no reason.

I appreciate the clarification on the Gridcoin thing, I will drop that moving forward. We could probably go back and forth about all the other stuff a million times, but I don't really think much good comes from any of that. I do want to respond to what I quoted above, though. I don't expect XS to admit to any wrong doing, nor did I accuse them of knowing ahead of time what was going on with TSBT. What would have went a really long way from any other teams in FB would have been some kind of acknowledgement that what we brought up had some validity, and at least needed looked at. There were a couple of teams that did jump in at one point(along with Natalia from ODLK), of which I'm very grateful. The main teams that are active on the FB forum are us, XS, TSBT and UKBT, though, and none of those had our back at all. I'm not expecting you guys to acknowledge any wrongdoing on your side, but you can't acknowledge that something happened that shouldn't have?

In a hypothetical situation where somebody from our team, or somebody from a team I'm friendly with was caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and then a bunch of people jumped in to gaslight and say it wasn't that, it was marathoning, etc. etc. etc. I would have posted something to stand up for what I feel is ethical and right regardless of who is involved. That thread is a shit show at this point due to how many posts have been removed, etc. but I can tell you how it felt from my perspective at the time - we posted something, with clear cut evidence of what happened, and a crap ton of people from a bunch of other teams on there jumped in to tell us how wrong we were and brush it under the rug. I still think most people never even looked at any of the hosts we linked to or anything because if they did they wouldn't have said the things they said. Even if you guys were not aware of it and not involved in it(which I believe you when you say, I have no reason to think otherwise), can you still not acknowledge at this point that what happened was wrong? If you can't, and Timbo can't, then how can I have any confidence moving forward that we're all after a fair competition? That was why I brought that up in this thread, in the context of whether we should continue in FB or not. As it stands, the closest thing that came out as "this wasn't right" was Timbo calling it "an error in judgement". Can nobody come out and say "a committee member should not have any pending tasks on their computer that were downloaded before the sprint project is announced"?

I don't claim to know Megacruncher's intentions. I don't know Megacruncher. I'm not expecting anybody to say bad things about Megacruncher. It would be nice though, if we can all look at the events that occurred objectively and say "this shouldn't have happened". As long as we cannot agree on that, I have no interest in competing in FB.

You're right, this board is public, but I really didn't feel like I could explain my reasoning for why I'm likely to vote no on this topic without explaining it. If I was trying to publicly call out XS, I would have done it on the ODLK forum, or on the Formula BOINC forum. If you read back through the Formula BOINC forum there were plenty of posts on the last few pages I could have jumped on to stir shit up, but I quit posting once we had at least explained what happened.

I really want to post this part again, though, because I feel like in all the drama it keeps getting missed -

Icecold said:
Ultimately, from my perspective the only way this competition succeeds is if the top output teams can come to a gentleman's agreement on what is acceptable and what is not and follow it. Us, and you guys and now P3D is more involved and maybe others are all high output teams with the potential output to act irresponsibly and ruin it for other teams. If you were one of 3 guys crunching on a league 2 team and you can't get any tasks you're not thinking "oh man ___ team is great they really stuck it to ____ team" you're thinking "man this competition sucks".

We all have the knowledge to perform "advanced bunkering" techniques. We each have members on our teams with several hundred(maybe even thousand+ for some?) processor threads, and a crap ton of video cards. We all have the power to potentially act irresponsibly, so unless there's a mechanism for getting everybody to play fair it's never going to happen. The only hope I see for FB to remain a fun competition is for the top teams to agree to what is fair, and self police our own teams. When a small league 2 team can't participate because there's no tasks, they don't care if I got them first, or Scole did, or you did, they just think that this competition is bogus. We're our own worst enemies in this - part of the appeal to FB or any BOINC competition is feeling like you won, you configured your hardware/software better, you prepared better, etc. What happens when there aren't other teams competing? Will you guys feel any satisfaction for being #1 in FB, and TSBT in #2, if there was nobody even really trying for the top spot behind you? What satisfaction is there in being the top dog, when you were just competing against yourselves? This is the turning point, everything is out in the open, this is where we can try to make this a fun fair competition, or we can let it go to shit. If it seems like there's any effort to keep it fun and fair, I'll vote yes in this thread, I still haven't voted for that reason.

If you want any more details on that Wanless Scole thing PM me and I'm happy to provide it I'm not really looking to publicly throw any more shade. The finality is actually fairly humorous. If you feel like it send me who you think JTFranklin is in a PM as well, we were all pretty curious ourselves. Enjoy the fresh air and whatnot!
 

SystemVipers

Member
May 18, 2013
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HI, I am the one vote for you guys to stay.
I don't want you to leave and really truly want you to stay. I bashed crashtech for questioning our integrity, well I was proven wrong and it pisses me off.
I want the SC to keep respect and help this go forward, We are trying hard to find a solution to gain back your trust. I can't debate anything now because of a promise, but I felt the need to tell you what I just said.
I like Fardringle and really like him in the SC. What a good thing if a member of TaaT and XS could work together to help make FB "keep on rockin", (Plus Tim and Seb)
But if we can find a way to keep you in the game that would be very cool.
I will leave now but as you see I have been a member well before rejoining XS4S.

Sorry to bother you at home
Steve
 

lane42

Diamond Member
Sep 3, 2000
5,721
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I just woke up my wife by pounding on the keyboard, so I guess I better stop now before I say too much.

Ya sound like a little bit of a hot head steve :rage:
 

Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
1,090
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HI, I am the one vote for you guys to stay.
I don't want you to leave and really truly want you to stay. I bashed crashtech for questioning our integrity, well I was proven wrong and it pisses me off.
I want the SC to keep respect and help this go forward, We are trying hard to find a solution to gain back your trust. I can't debate anything now because of a promise, but I felt the need to tell you what I just said.
I like Fardringle and really like him in the SC. What a good thing if a member of TaaT and XS could work together to help make FB "keep on rockin", (Plus Tim and Seb)
But if we can find a way to keep you in the game that would be very cool.
I will leave now but as you see I have been a member well before rejoining XS4S.

Sorry to bother you at home
Steve

Hi Steve - I appreciate your post. I'm going to give everything a day or two to settle down before I vote either way, and give everybody else here an opportunity to voice any thoughts. I wanted to at least acknowledge your post , though, and mention that I appreciate the part about trying to find a solution we can all trust, etc.
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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Oh, and as far as bunkering early.. If the "committee" was comprised of one member of every competing team, and the minute it was agreed upon, ALL members could let their team start bunkering.

As far as this project with a limited number of tasks, that should be removed from consideration based on that.
 

crashtech

Lifer
Jan 4, 2013
10,521
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HI, I am the one vote for you guys to stay.
I don't want you to leave and really truly want you to stay. I bashed crashtech for questioning our integrity, well I was proven wrong and it pisses me off.
I want the SC to keep respect and help this go forward, We are trying hard to find a solution to gain back your trust. I can't debate anything now because of a promise, but I felt the need to tell you what I just said.
I like Fardringle and really like him in the SC. What a good thing if a member of TaaT and XS could work together to help make FB "keep on rockin", (Plus Tim and Seb)
But if we can find a way to keep you in the game that would be very cool.
I will leave now but as you see I have been a member well before rejoining XS4S.

Sorry to bother you at home
Steve
I accept your apology, such as it is. ;)
 
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biodoc

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2005
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I voted yes but I'll be selective in which sprints I'll participate. I think it would be productive and less stressful if we just wipe the slate clean, so to speak, and start fresh. Perhaps virtual handshakes are in order?
 

Skivelitis2

Member
Jan 1, 2021
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Although I voted no I am willing to give the next Sprint a go if enough of us are in to make the effort worth it. The fact that Fardringle has not resigned from the steering committee tells me there is still hope the situation can be salvaged and is still worthwhile. I'll be rather hesitant to switch projects between the announcement that a project has been chosen and the actual reveal however!
 
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StefanR5R

Elite Member
Dec 10, 2016
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TeAm,
somewhat off-topic to this thread I reported here earlier what my individual involvement with Formula BOINC will be, and a major but not sole reason why. More on-topic, I am only adding that I have no real opinion about what the TeAm's involvement should be.

@VietOZ and @SystemVipers, thanks for stopping by and commenting here.
VietOZ, you peripherally mentioned Pentathlon. I have some trivial and obvious observations about Pentathlon's vs. Formula BOINC's condition:
  • Pentathlon has a small but dedicated, highly skilled, highly experienced team of organizers who are putting a tremendous effort into the design, preparation, execution, and supervision of the event. The participants at Pentathlon are well aware of this.
  • Formula BOINC ran practically unsupervised for the last several years, almost entirely on autopilot. The active participants in Formula BOINC are aware of this.
  • All teams who are participating in Pentathlon are there because they applied for the event, and were approved (or at least not de-listed) by the organizers. The participants are aware of this.
  • The teams who are 'participating' (for lack of a better word) in Formula BOINC are there because they were listed many years ago. (Except for a small number of teams who applied and were admitted first into league 3 to work their way up from there, as per to the published Formula BOINC rules.) The few teams in Formula BOINC who are actively participating are well aware that the majority of 'contestants' around them don't care about Formula BOINC, or never even heard of Formula BOINC.
  • Among those who participate in both Pentathlon and Formula BOINC, there seems to be a small number of individual users who behave themselves in Formula BOINC differently than in Pentathlon.
I believe the last point (if it has any merit) is induced by the previous points.
 

Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
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I ended up voting yes, but I think based on the results of this poll that (at least at this time) overall as a team we will be much more limited in our involvement, and standing in Formula BOINC than we were last year since we're down to just a few people that have any interest in giving it a shot. I agree with @biodoc as far as being selective in which sprints we run, there are a small handful of projects I'm not necessarily interested in running as part of a sprint.

It sounds like @Skivelitis2 @biodoc , @Fardringle ? and myself will have a challenge on our hands in the next sprint :p

@SystemVipers or @VietOZ would either one of you at least be willing to bring up to the rest of XS (and the members on TSBT that you're friends with maybe) what I had posted above about coming up with a few ground rules we all agree on as a 'gentleman's agreement'? I'm not asking you to endorse my idea but at least mention it even if it's "this clown Icecold won't quit bringing up this Gentleman's agreement" . Especially if our team's involvement is lower, overall the competition should be less intense - you guys will be able to devote most of your resources on beating P3D without having to worry about keeping TSBT ahead of us, so I'd like to think the need for some of the more "extreme" bunkering techniques, etc. could be toned down a bit. I'm not suggesting making it a vanilla no bunkering competition, just maybe cutting out some of the type of stuff that will leave smaller teams without tasks to crunch and stuff like that which causes some of the negativity surrounding the competition.
 
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Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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I ended up voting yes, but I think based on the results of this poll that (at least at this time) overall as a team we will be much more limited in our involvement, and standing in Formula BOINC than we were last year since we're down to just a few people that have any interest in giving it a shot. I agree with @biodoc as far as being selective in which sprints we run, there are a small handful of projects I'm not necessarily interested in running as part of a sprint.

It sounds like @Skivelitis2 @biodoc , @Fardringle ? and myself will have a challenge on our hands in the next sprint :p

@SystemVipers or @VietOZ would either one of you at least be willing to bring up to the rest of XS (and the members on TSBT that you're friends with maybe) what I had posted above about coming up with a few ground rules we all agree on as a 'gentleman's agreement'? I'm not asking you to endorse my idea but at least mention it even if it's "this clown Icecold won't quit bringing up this Gentleman's agreement" . Especially if our team's involvement is lower, overall the competition should be less intense - you guys will be able to devote most of your resources on beating P3D without having to worry about keeping TSBT ahead of us, so I'd like to think the need for some of the more "extreme" bunkering techniques, etc. could be toned down a bit. I'm not suggesting making it a vanilla no bunkering competition, just maybe cutting out some of the type of stuff that will leave smaller teams without tasks to crunch and stuff like that which causes some of the negativity surrounding the competition.
I have always been selective on what I run. If its medical, I will participate if others on our team are going to.

Let me know. I am just unhappy about the whole situation.
 

Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
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Edit - I deleted the contents of this post, it's really not worth anybody's time to think about or care what sketch ass TSBT is up to.

I changed my vote to a no, I have no interest in continuing with FB at this time. @SystemVipers if you really want to know why send me a PM, but no matter what changes the committee makes TSBT is committed to competing in as anti-competitive shady ways as possible, so there's no changing that.
 
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Icecold

Golden Member
Nov 15, 2004
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Going against my own advice, I do feel the need to clarify one thing

some clown over at TSBT said:
Icecold, you are such a slime ball weasel. Your team bunkers just like all the others but you go around to the project admins and point our hosts and tell the admins lies about those hosts have so many WUs. You're a weasel.
I've literally never reported a single host to a single project admin(or project scientist) on any project ever. If that is what you think happened here, we really should all crowd fund you a subscription to Hooked on Phonics because clearly reading is hard for you. I wasn't even the one that posted initially on the FB forum about Megacruncher, I just jumped in to defend the truth when everybody from TSBT jumped in with gaslighting and clear falsehoods. When Natalia posted DavidBAM's host list she even included a link to the forum she got it from, which is not our's and was not posted by me. I was as surprised as anybody when she posted it. Also this never had anything to do with bunkering, it had to do with your committee member voting for a project that is well known to not be able to have more than 450k-500k tasks at a time, and then bunkering thousands of tasks for that project 2 days prior to the sprint announcement based on his 100% prior knowledge that it had been chosen. I bolded and underlined it here since I know reading can be difficult for you guys. Anything I "pointed out" was posted publicly to the Formula BOINC forum, but it's clear you guys never even looked at it you just jumped right into coverup mode. Calling out your cheating publicly to your face is not weasel behavior.
 

VietOZ

Member
Aug 3, 2019
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Well, I can inform you guys that XS is now officially done with FB. Good luck with all the teams still are in it and have a great year !

OZ
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
25,482
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Going against my own advice, I do feel the need to clarify one thing


I've literally never reported a single host to a single project admin(or project scientist) on any project ever. If that is what you think happened here, we really should all crowd fund you a subscription to Hooked on Phonics because clearly reading is hard for you. I wasn't even the one that posted initially on the FB forum about Megacruncher, I just jumped in to defend the truth when everybody from TSBT jumped in with gaslighting and clear falsehoods. When Natalia posted DavidBAM's host list she even included a link to the forum she got it from, which is not our's and was not posted by me. I was as surprised as anybody when she posted it. Also this never had anything to do with bunkering, it had to do with your committee member voting for a project that is well known to not be able to have more than 450k-500k tasks at a time, and then bunkering thousands of tasks for that project 2 days prior to the sprint announcement based on his 100% prior knowledge that it had been chosen. I bolded and underlined it here since I know reading can be difficult for you guys. Anything I "pointed out" was posted publicly to the Formula BOINC forum, but it's clear you guys never even looked at it you just jumped right into coverup mode. Calling out your cheating publicly to your face is not weasel behavior.
Clarification please. What team was bunkering early with prior knowledge ? TSBT ? And what team is Megacruncher and DavidBAM part of ? And what team is Natalia on ? and who is the commitee member, and what team do they work on ?

I am just trying to put teams on these names, and figure out who did wrong.