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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Website Support
Thread: Change to the Project Progress Bars |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 164
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jhindo
Former World Community Grid Admin Joined: Aug 25, 2009 Post Count: 250 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hello everyone,
After a great deal of review and discussion, we've made a change to how we articulate the progress of each active project. We've noticed that the previous use of progress bars on the Research Overview page - where each project showed a percentage completed – did not match how most research projects were using World Community Grid. Most research teams don't send us a certain amount of work when their project launches, run through it all, then declare the project complete. Rather, they create work units based on their initial research questions and time constraints, refine the project scope and direction based on results received from World Community Grid volunteers, then continue to create additional work units accordingly. There's no fail-safe way for them to predict how many work units they will run on World Community Grid, either at the beginning of projects or while they're running on World Community Grid. Our attempt to estimate a percentage complete for each active project has therefore not been truly representative of how far along a project is - you may have noticed the percentages in project progress bars fluctuate up and down, or stay stagnant for an extended time. For volunteers who monitor the these bars closely, this has understandably caused much confusion, angst and frustration. We have therefore implemented new progress bars to visually indicate which of three phases each active project is in:
While we realize that some volunteers enjoyed monitoring the percentages of the progress bars–and we hesitated a long time to make this change because of this–percentages are not an accurate reflection of how researchers use World Community Grid. Please make any comments or ask questions in this thread rather than starting new threads on this subject. We appreciate your participation and support. Juan |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thanks. FAHB (FAH2) says 'Completed'... guess that I'm crunching on vapor to get to 5 years ;?)
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knreed
Former World Community Grid Tech Joined: Nov 8, 2004 Post Count: 4504 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Thanks. FAHB (FAH2) says 'Completed'... guess that I'm crunching on vapor to get to 5 years ;?) Nope - it means when I deployed the website update I set "FAAH" (https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/faah/overview.do) to "In Progress" instead of setting "FAHB" (https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/fahb/overview.do) to "In Progrss". My error has been corrected and FAHB now correctly shows as in progress. Thanks for mentioning it. [Edit 1 times, last edit by knreed at May 13, 2019 3:44:08 PM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Phew. A [slight] improvement would be if mouse hovering over the blue crumbs would tell which phases there are, but guess 'In Progress' is the equivalent to 2 crumbs.
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katoda
Senior Cruncher Poland Joined: Apr 28, 2007 Post Count: 170 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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As instructed in another thread, I would like to add my two cents and to say that I do not like the change at all.
----------------------------------------Citing myself: "[...] I lost at least a very approximate information about on what project I should put more resources in order to ensure achieving a specific badge. Currently all are "In progress" and for sure there is a huge difference between e.g. Zika and MIP and, in order to ensure 10y badge, I should put more devices on Zika than on MIP. Now I have no idea. At least an estimated completion date should be kept in API result." The original thread is locked, so I would like to get feedback here.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
OK, my 2p'th as well:
First off, I was confused by the four sections to the bar after I'd read your original post, as it only seemed to refer to three, but the help behind it makes it clear. HOWEVER, this gives rise to two more points: a) We'll never see the fourth section filled in if you move projects to the 'completed research" page, so what's the point of it? Are you going to move all projects onto one single page and order them by the number of bar sections filled in? b) There's still no indication of what you propose to do with projects that are 'on hold', or "intermittent". Perhaps change the colour of the filled-in bars to indicate either where it was when it was held, or where it will be when it starts again, and/or add some text to the bar? In fact, the more I think about this, a traffic light colour scheme might make sense to crunchers: for example, green could mean the project is running normally, amber that it's on hold for some reason, and red that it's completed/abandoned. And, though I doubt it would make sense to implement it, 'on hold' could be used in situations other than "no work at present" -- it could also mean something like "we've stopped sending work out because of a problem (such as a validator issue, a link to the researchers has gone down and we're going to run out of space, there's a software problem and they're all failing -- whatever)". Second, I really can't see the problem with a percentage, provided that it is perfectly clear ON THE SAME PAGE (and not just in the help behind it) that it refers to known available work. If a project runs out of work, but it is known that more is coming at some future, but unknown, time, then there is a need to flag this (and maybe never let the progress shown get beyond 99%?). Your new scheme makes no difference to this -- see my first point. I think that's enough for now. Thanks for listening. |
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SNURK
Veteran Cruncher The Netherlands Joined: Nov 26, 2007 Post Count: 1217 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I always believed the previous progress bars were great!
----------------------------------------At least they gave some sort of estimate if a project was likely to end in weeks, months or years. Of course you had to accept the fact that progress would sometimes stall, jump backward or forward, depending on new info from the researchers. I also believe there was too much complaining going on in these forums about the irregular behavior of the progress bars. So maybe we brought this change onto ourselves. The introduction of the previous progress bars was definitely a big step forward, now it feels like two steps back.  |
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cepqmraka
Cruncher Joined: Apr 1, 2014 Post Count: 1 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Nah , change them back. The new ones are demotivating , also people love the sensation of achievement and when the progress bar is filling up. I regularly check the progress bars, with the new ones i don't need to visit the website ever , because it will be "in progress" forever. Good night!
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cjslman
Master Cruncher Mexico Joined: Nov 23, 2004 Post Count: 2082 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Well, I think it has it's pros and cons. It looks great, but it doesn't specify what it means (starting, in progress, finishing, done). I can understand the reason for the change (investigators feedback not accurate or timely), but on the other hand it doesn't give any indication what the progress (or at what point) of the project is at. I seem to remember previous projects that had their own sites where you could see the progress (by batches), but again, that depends on the investigators keeping it up to date. Just as a side note, I remember suggesting to one of the investigators of the one projects about implementing this type of site to see the progress and the response was: "Great idea, you can set it up and run it". I guess we'll have to see how this change evolves.
----------------------------------------CJSL Don't worry and keep crunching... |
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Skivelitis2
Advanced Cruncher USA Joined: Mar 21, 2015 Post Count: 113 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Classic case of "be careful what you wish for"....
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