MLC@Home is happy to announce that badges are now available!

We're scientists, not artists; but why not have some fun:

There are three types of badges volunteers can earn:

1) RAC Badges: badges for having a (user/team) with a high RAC for the project. These are gold/silver/bronze badges for top 1%, 5%, and 25% RAC.

2) Milestone Badges: Starting today (October 1st 2020), we've enabled sub-project credit reporting. While we only have one sub-project at the moment (MLDS), we plan to have more in the future. With this, we're instituting "Milestone badges" you can earn for contributing a certain number of credits per sub-project. These badges are available at milestones, the first being 10K credits. While all users retain their overall credit (I repeat no credit is lost), these badges will only be awarded for work done after today, when the server started keeping track of per-app credit. Thresholds for milestone badges are (currently) 10K (onyx), 500K (amethyst), 1M (sapphire), 500M (ruby), and 1B (emerald) credits.

3) Special Badges: These are special, one-off badges for special events. The first one is a reward for those who have supported our little project so far. We're going to grant an "Early Adopter" badge for anyone who has any type of credit on this project during its first 100 days. This project went live the night of June 30th, 2020, so that leaves just 1 week (October 8th!) to earn some credit and qualify for the badge.

We hope that these badges help keep things fun, and motivate all of you to keep supporting our work. We're so close to not only writing our first papers based on these results, but also releasing these datasets so others (maybe even you) can build our collective effort. There is no way we could do this without you.

Thank you!
-- The MLC@Home Admins

We know it's not optimal to have the milestone badges not include the total credit accumulated before we flipped the switch on per-app credit. I suppose it's something we should have been doing from the start (I was sad the server didn't convert it all itself when we turned on the feature).

Fixing that, however, will require (carefully!) hand-editing the database to re-assign the old credit, and also diving into the server code to understand exactly how per-app credit works internally so we know how to update the old credit appropriately.

So we've made the decision, for now at least, to only include credit earned from this point onward. To help ameliorate that somewhat, everyone with credit will, of course, qualify for the Early Adopter badge, and the descriptions for the milestone badges have been updated to explicitly say "...since October 2020" so it's obvious its only counting credit since today. We hope that's an acceptable solution, at least for the time being. We may revisit this in the future (we can always go back later), but for now we felt it was more important to get milestone badges out there.

Again, no credit is lost, and this only applies to the milestone badges. RAC based are based on total RAC regardless of per-app credit tracking.

We hope people have fun with these! And we can add more special and milestone ones in the future!

Thanks for updating us on this topic. Appreciate your hard work and I am thrilled to see badges implemented now! Well done!

And we can add more special and milestone ones in the future!

And this is an even more exciting prospect for the future :)

And hopefully these badges will be made available to the stats sites? (Milestone/special badges) :)

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And hopefully these badges will be made available to the stats sites? (Milestone/special badges) :)

https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/stats/tables.xml

badges are already in export data.
but it is better to exclude RAC badges from export
anyway, over time they will disappear from signatures

PS I would like to clarify
2 applications are formally defined - MLDG and test
Are they counted as one or the test only goes to total?

PS2 I missed the preliminary discussion, but I would like to give an opinion
accumulate better special badges with unique designs
linear ones of the same type (10k 100k 1M), especially with per_apps accounting,
it is better to replace the previous ones with a new one - that is, one badge per app

inconsistency with (test) - the application dropped out of statistics
on statistics page Participants - Per application - array size error

inconsistency with (test) - the application dropped out of statistics
on statistics page Participants - Per application - array size error

Noted, looking into it.

And yes, there is only one "sub-project" defined at the moment, and both "mlds" and "mldstest" count towards this.

3) Special Badges: These are special, one-off badges for special events. The first one is a reward for those who have supported our little project so far. We're going to grant an "Early Adopter" badge for anyone who has any type of credit on this project during its first 100 days. This project went live the night of June 30th, 2020, so that leaves just 1 week (October 8th!) to earn some credit and qualify for the badge.

My early adopter badge isn't showing. I joined 1 Jul 2020, and have over 5m in credit, generated from the start.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

My early adopter badge isn't showing. I joined 1 Jul 2020, and have over 5m in credit. Doesn't that qualify?

Appears this badge has not been issued yet. My interpretation was it will be issued on 10/8. I could be wrong though.
Cheers.

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Correct, we'll issue early adopter badges on or about 10/8.. its just simpler for us that way.

As for filtering RAC badges from export, this may have come up before, but I'm not sure why that's desirable? Is it because they can be lost as RAC changes, and stats sites don't like that? or...? Also, I don't see an easy way of filtering besides hacking the source, am I missing something?

Thanks again for implementing this!

Wow Dataman! You already got a stunning collection ready here, just waiting to be exported to your impressive signature. Congrats!

We know it's not optimal to have the milestone badges not include the total credit accumulated before we flipped the switch on per-app credit. I suppose it's something we should have been doing from the start (I was sad the server didn't convert it all itself when we turned on the feature).

Fixing that, however, will require (carefully!) hand-editing the database to re-assign the old credit, and also diving into the server code to understand exactly how per-app credit works internally so we know how to update the old credit appropriately.

So we've made the decision, for now at least, to only include credit earned from this point onward. To help ameliorate that somewhat, everyone with credit will, of course, qualify for the Early Adopter badge, and the descriptions for the milestone badges have been updated to explicitly say "...since October 2020" so it's obvious its only counting credit since today. We hope that's an acceptable solution, at least for the time being. We may revisit this in the future (we can always go back later), but for now we felt it was more important to get milestone badges out there.

Given that you still only have 1 application I would have thought it would have been fairly trivial to update everybodies per-app credit to equal their total credit using a script, it would be far better that you do it now before you introduce new applications.

I do not see anywhere that it says "...since October 2020" to the badges that have been awarded so far, your's just says "[MLDS] 10K Credits".

We know it's not optimal to have the milestone badges not include the total credit accumulated before we flipped the switch on per-app credit. I suppose it's something we should have been doing from the start (I was sad the server didn't convert it all itself when we turned on the feature).

Fixing that, however, will require (carefully!) hand-editing the database to re-assign the old credit, and also diving into the server code to understand exactly how per-app credit works internally so we know how to update the old credit appropriately.

So we've made the decision, for now at least, to only include credit earned from this point onward. To help ameliorate that somewhat, everyone with credit will, of course, qualify for the Early Adopter badge, and the descriptions for the milestone badges have been updated to explicitly say "...since October 2020" so it's obvious its only counting credit since today. We hope that's an acceptable solution, at least for the time being. We may revisit this in the future (we can always go back later), but for now we felt it was more important to get milestone badges out there.

Given that you still only have 1 application I would have thought it would have been fairly trivial to update everybodies per-app credit to equal their total credit using a script, it would be far better that you do it now before you introduce new applications.

I do not see anywhere that it says "...since October 2020" to the badges that have been awarded so far, your's just says "[MLDS] 10K Credits".

Hmm.. Each badge entry in the DB has an ID, a name, and a description. I updated the description, not realizing the UI (at least on this site) is only showing the name as alt-text in the image. Will fix. Thanks.

And it certainly will be easier to do before we add a new app! The problem is that credit is now kept in two places (the original user table, and a special new user_app table). RAC is also now calculated in two places as well. How would just adding the old credit to the new table effect the per-app RAC calculation? If one day 3 months worth of credit just showed up, that would be way off. So definitely doable, and *may* be as simple as "per_app_total += global_total - per_app_total", but we're not going to blindly go in there and do that without assuring ourselves it doesn't break something.

Hi, no badges for us ?? ))
th

Hmm.. Each badge entry in the DB has an ID, a name, and a description. I updated the description, not realizing the UI (at least on this site) is only showing the name as alt-text in the image. Will fix. Thanks.

And it certainly will be easier to do before we add a new app! The problem is that credit is now kept in two places (the original user table, and a special new user_app table). RAC is also now calculated in two places as well. How would just adding the old credit to the new table effect the per-app RAC calculation? If one day 3 months worth of credit just showed up, that would be way off. So definitely doable, and *may* be as simple as "per_app_total += global_total - per_app_total", but we're not going to blindly go in there and do that without assuring ourselves it doesn't break something.

The admin panel for setting up the badges is not very helpful and the wiki page https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BadgeDoc explains nothing about the panel and what the fields are used for. Be aware that badges are displayed on the forum and user home page in the order they are listed in the table, I expect you added them in order but if you add special badges and then go and add higher credit badges they will get mixed up unless you re-order them.

Not quite sure why you'd choose "per_app_total += global_total - per_app_total" rather than "per_app_total = global_total" ?
I'd certainly do it whilst the server wasn't validating/awarding more credit.
If you want you can just practice on mine, I'm not actively crunching but do have 11 pending at the time of writing.

I can't difinitively tell you how the RAC will be affected, I wouldn't expect it to affect host RAC calculations but user RAC probably would shoot up. RAC however is transient, it rises and falls, it will eventually re-adjust to reflect the true status quo. It might blip but will go away, leaving users with higher credit than the badge level will be a regular topic raised on your forum. If you want further guidance there is the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_Credit_System or you could try asking at Boinc forum https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_index.php or maybe in the boinc_projects group https://groups.google.com/a/ssl.berkeley.edu/g/boinc_projects

I see josef j has just posted wondering where his badges are !

I suggest you limit the flood of badges to one per sub-project, i.e. let a higher badge replace the previous one of the same type. Multiple sub-projects with several badges each will give a mess, more so if the badges look the same.

affect host RAC calculations but user RAC..... WE --CPU -- donators are on boinc projects years under-credited or "underRAC" ted,,,, while gpu project like collatz use rac hamsters to get up in top world "
why projects owners are sooo ***** on increasing RAC for cpu donators??? this can make projects atractive for users and get more users to their own project.
really, project owners are not good "managers"" ...) in real woorld they will just loose in one day and bankrupt ,, in competence of others,,, just think what i try just explaine to all,,,,,,
simply increase RAC for cpu projects 1000 times ! you can do it easy , just up ratio in datab..
its really shame for us who use just cpu ,,becouse you dont develop gpu app.

Minor update:

I'll try moving over the old credit later this week when (hopefully) we'll have some scheduled downtime to move to the new server. For those who don't have badges yet, give me another week. That'll also coincide with the early adopter badge. I can practice on my own account first :)

Minor update:

I'll try moving over the old credit later this week when (hopefully) we'll have some scheduled downtime to move to the new server. For those who don't have badges yet, give me another week. That'll also coincide with the early adopter badge. I can practice on my own account first :)

Good luck!

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

I started implementing the badges at Free-DC, there seems to be a bunch of inconsistencies in the data.

The tables.xml file which contains the badge data first of all

I don't think it should contain the full url, but more problematic is that it has the wrong names for the images themselves. For instance

<badge>
<id>2</id>
<name>user_mlds_0</name>
<title>[MLDS] 10K Credits (since Oct 2020)</title>
<image_url>https://www.mlcathome.org/badges/badge2-black.png</image_url>
</badge>

whereas the url is img/mlds_bronze.png ?