Hello Crunchers! We've been throwing around the idea of creating profile badges here at MilkyWay@home for a while now, but we seem to always have a more mission-critical problem to solve (coding, science, etc.) - until now! In the image below, you will find all of the badges that we will be rolling out in the next few days!



As a user, you can expect to have between 0 and 4 badges on your MW profile:

• "Joined MilkyWay@home": This badge is awarded to everyone who crunches at least one work unit for our project, as a Thank You for helping out!
  
• "Credits Earned": This badge represents the latest credit milestone that a user has passed, ranging from 10,000 (10k) to 10 billion (10B).
  
• "Years of Service": This badge displays the number of years that a user has been with MilkyWay@home! (The first of these badges is acquired after one full year)
  
• "Special Contribution": This badge goes to anyone who has donated hardware, money, significant expertise, or service towards the project.
  

Coincidentally, we've just updated our donation page to work with the existing system here at RPI :
https://securelb.imodules.com/s/1225/index.aspx?sid=1225&gid=1&pgid=3676

(You can also find the donation link on the MilkyWay@home homepage)

(Please note that once the badges go live, it will take us a bit to get the special contribution badges organized - please bear with us.)

I will be building a webpage that describes these badges. Originally, I wanted to do a "Cosmic distance milestones" badge system, but I didn't have enough space to work with - So I'll put those milestones on the description page instead!

We hope that you'll enjoy the badges!

Cheers,
Matthew N.

(P.S.: MilkyWay@home HD wallpapers coming soon!)

[Edit: Updated image so the green 5-star badge reads "50M" instead of "50k"]
[Edit: Updated image to include more intermediate rewards]

Hi
You should have badges for 2M, 3M and 4M. To go from 1M to 5M between badges is a bit much.
My laptop is on 24/7 and only crunches 0.5M stones a year. So it will take roughly 8 years to go from 1 badge to the next!
Also what is to stop anyone registering and doing one work unit and never crunching again. they will see their levels of service badges increase without really earning them. You should only award service badges to anyone who completes a certain number of units per year or better still they have to crunch units on a certain number of days per year.

I take it that 50k should read 50M?

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I take it that 50k should read 50M?

Hi

Also what is to stop anyone registering and doing one work unit and never crunching again. they will see their levels of service badges increase without really earning them. You should only award service badges to anyone who completes a certain number of units per year or better still they have to crunch units on a certain number of days per year.

Agree !

Also what is to stop anyone registering and doing one work unit and never crunching again. they will see their levels of service badges increase without really earning them. You should only award service badges to anyone who completes a certain number of units per year or better still they have to crunch units on a certain number of days per year.

Agree ![/quote]

I kind of like both, some pc's are REALLY, REALLY fast while others are REALLY, REALLY slow, to accommodate the slow ones units per year would suffice, but if a fast one did the same number of units in 3 months should that also constitute a year? So maybe x number per month would cover both, but use a sliding scale, so the slow pc's are not penalized, and the fast pc's are not over compensated as in doing 25 units in 3 days and calling that enough for that month. But maybe 25 units is all a slow pc can do in a month, do you really want to exclude people just because they can't buy new hardware?

Other then that I LOVE the new badges and think they are a great idea and addition!!

Will the badges be retroactive for work done up to now?

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And can we have the badges also show up on our Teams list so that we can see how we match up to each other? Some of the other badge projects do this.

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Great idea and good distances between the badges :)
Would get the multiple green stars and soon the silver III =)

The "50k" Problem is already pointed out i read *GG*

I think too the 1 credit badge shouldnd activaded to prevent "fake accounts".

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DSKAG Austria Research Team: http://www.research.dskag.at

Thanks for the feedback!

- I updated the image so that it properly reads "50M"

- I'll look into adding smaller incremental badges at "lower" levels - such as 2M, 3M, 20M, etc. badges. It does make sense to have them.

- I would like the time badges be valid only if the account has been actively crunching for that long, but this is a tricky thing to measure. If we are too lax, there will be ways to "game" the system, and if we are too strict, some deserving users may be cut out. I'm thinking that the time badges should only display if a user's current RAC > 0?

- I'll move the 1 credit badge up to 100 credits; that should be 1-2 WUs. I'm ok with "fake accounts" having the badge as long as they've done something towards the project.

- All badges will be retroactive.

...
- I would like the time badges be valid only if the account has been actively crunching for that long, but this is a tricky thing to measure. If we are too lax, there will be ways to "game" the system, and if we are too strict, some deserving users may be cut out. I'm thinking that the time badges should only display if a user's current RAC > 0?...

Can't you just make a sum of Elapsed time of returned WU's regardless of their Validity (or something similar)? This is how WCG awards its badges (w/o Error tasks) and I think it works fine - when I am active, the time for badges goes up. When I am not, time counter stops :-)
I know - this would be hard to measure rectroactively :-(

Cheers, NI!

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For Science and Shrubberies! Since January 13 2000.

I've added badges for intermediate levels (see updated image, above), so that the general pattern is:

1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 5 -> 10

Travis should provide an ETA for implementation soon.

I know - this would be hard to measure rectroactively :-(

That's the hard part of every time badge scheme that we've come up with. By requiring RAC > 0.0 for the badge to display, then anyone who is crunching something will get the badge. Someone could have created an account 4 years ago and not crunched anything, but then crunch one WU and get the 4yr badge - but it will disappear if their RAC drops to 0. If they crunch another WU a year later, the 5yr badge will show up. It's not perfect, but loyal crunchers tend to maintain a non-zero RAC anyway, and keeping the badge "active" might serve as an incentive for occasional users to crunch a MW WU every now and then...

We're looking into other ways to make it work, but we need to dig around the database a bit and see what data we have available.

Thank you for the badge system very well \o/

Happy Holiday season to all of you!

A proposal for retroactive time badeges: maybe you can estimate based on the credits the time needed - at WCG I see about 40k-45k BOINC cr/90 days for all subprojects for my configuration.

The time required is for sure depending on the cpus, but that may be available from your database.

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Is it possible to include a badge to indicate a CPU contribution of 50%/75%/100% to a participants contribution to the project?

A proposal for retroactive time badeges: maybe you can estimate based on the credits the time needed - at WCG I see about 40k-45k BOINC cr/90 days for all subprojects for my configuration.

The time required is for sure depending on the cpus, but that may be available from your database.

This might work for CPU-only projects (doubt that actually, unless the project is very new), but the difference in processing time between CPUs and GPUs here is too big. Also it does not make sense to consider just the current machines sombody is running the project on, he or she might have started with a lot slower ones (my first Milkyway WUs were done on a AthlonXP 2000+ for example).

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How soon is soon? lol

How soon is soon? lol

A pure guess would be a couple of days, but I have seen dates being given for software releases in the past that when missed catch holy heck, EVEN when they said it was a pure guess. I think alot of places are less and less likely to give firm dates. Even the new Xbox One and PS4 had to be updated right out of the box prior to being first used, and they were announced months in advance.

I just returned from my holiday vacation, so I'll be getting on this again.

Looking forward to seeing them ;)

A question more relevent for 2016 but will you be adding badge pairs for extened years of service after platinum?

(bronze),(silver),(gold),(platinum),(rarer metal),(unobtainium)

or adjusting the service ranges for (bronze),(silver),(gold),(platinum) in the future?