View this page "BOINC project competitions"

[John37309]

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/boinc-team-founders/web/boinc-project-competitions
- or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't
work.

BOINC project competitions

(Please feel free to edit this page to add your suggestions)

I suggest that a competition script be added to the BOINC source code
so that competitions can be held on any BOINC project.

Anyone in this group should feel free to edit the page I have built to
add comments or extra stuff to make the competitions better.

Suggestions for BOINC competitions;

A) A link should be added to the team "Founder/Admin management
functions" that says "Click here to visit team Competition page"
Explain note; enter your team in a competition or start a new
competition.

B) Link added to project front page called "Competition Page"

C) Link added to each project team page linking to "Competition Page"

How the competitions work and the competition page;

(Also see notes at the bottom of this page about how this currently
works on world community grid.)

1) To start a competition will be just like starting a new team, the
founder clicks the button "Start New Competition" and fills out the
competition details. (Only a team founder or Admin can enter his team
in a competition.)

Competition details you must fill out;

a) Competition name;

b) Competition type; Private challenge to another team; or Open
competition, any team can join.

c) Type of team entry; Your full team: or Sub-teams or Only members
that have clicked to join this one competition.

d) Start time and date, in UTC or GMT

e) Finish time and date, in UTC or GMT. (Time limit of one month max;
We can review this limit)

f) Competition description; Describe what this competition is about
(If BOINC implements the "Rich text editor", this can be used to do a
nice competition description just like posting a message on a message
board.

g) Use the new function "Create team message board" to allow you to
create a special competition message where teams can chat about this
competition.

h) Prizes; Gold, Silver and Bronze image medals displayed on your team
page.

When finished you competition page will look a bit like team pages
current do but instead of team members, you will have team names.

2) Any person that visits the competition page on the project can see
the list of competitions that are running and the stats. This might
encourage people to join a team just to have some fun.

3) The stats will start running on the start time and date. They will
stop on the finish time and date.

4) You cannot join a competition once the competition has started. But
if you are in a competition, you can click a button to leave. If you
do that, your competition credit stays with the team you were on.

5) No previous credit is used during the competition; everybody
starts each competition with zero credit that is just measured
separately to your normal credit.

6) For competitions that are "Members must click to join", a button is
added to that competition page for doing this on EACH TEAM. You need
this type of competition for very large teams. This allows for sub-
teams to be formed on very large teams like SETI.Germany and SETI.USA

7) A daily stats file could be produced by the project that is
separate to their normal stats dump. This is for the stats websites
like Boincstats so they can do in-depth competition results. The stats
websites that are doing competition stats will be allowed to have
there website link on the competition page, maybe a logo also. This
will encourage stats sites to do really good stats, signatures and
results for competitions because they will get extra traffic through
their website with better stats.

8) Competition progress page should be able to display the results for
end of each competition day (24hrs intervals) in a separate column so
you can see each days progress as the competition develops. (The stats
websites might be better at this)

9) An RPC is added so that people can get individual competition
stats in xml format.

10) Possibly add an RSS feed with news about competition updates and
results for the competition page area.

11) Winning prizes of certificates (Like the SETI@home certificate)
will be given to the top 3 teams in any competition. (We can review
this for other prizes). Might be possible to add an image of a
"Winning Medal" on your team page on that project. The top three teams
would have gold, silver and bronze image medal displayed on there team
page. The image will stay there for a defined period; example 4 months
(We can debate this). A good team could build up several medals on
their team page. (I can make the medal images if necessary, John37309)

12) The project competition page will display a section with honours
and results of previous competitions. Projects could add this stuff to
their project front page to make the project more exciting to new
users. If your project has very little news, this is good stuff to
make your project exciting and attract new users.

13) With the consent of other team founders here, I (John37309) would
like to add a link on the competition page for team help and support
for competitions at www.boincteams.com

14) Please edit this page and add suggestion

15) Please edit this page and add suggestion

16) Please edit this page and add suggestion

17) Please edit this page and add suggestion

18) Please edit this page and add suggestion

World community Grid has been running team competitions for several
months with very good success. We can learn from them and apply this
to a BOINC so it can be used on any project.

Here are some links to World Community Grid team challenge pages;

WCG teams page;
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewTeams.do

WCG view all current challenges;
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewAllTeamChallenges.do

Please edit this page and add suggestion

John.

[Knightmare]

I have one addition I would like to see made.

We ( our team ) is not competitive in nature. I have run the idea of
team vs team challenges by them before, and no one on the team really
wants anything to do with it. They would prefer to just keep crunching
for whatever project we choose and not think about " beating " other teams.

That being the case....what I would like to see is an option for the
team founders to get notified of a challenge, and the ability to " opt
out " if the team doesn't want to do it.

[John 37309]

Edit the page Kinguni and add that as a suggestion or idea.

The pages are there for everybody that has suggestions or ideas.

Sounds very reasonable to me anyway.

John.

[David Anderson]

John:

Excellent ideas!

I'll forward this to the boinc_dev email list
(and I encourage you to join that list and cross-post to it).
We need to find someone (a PHP programmer) to implement this stuff.
I've been working on web code (forums etc.) for a few weeks now,
but I need to switch back to other things (like getting
the client to work right on Vista) and we have no one else available.

-- David

[John 37309]

I signed up to all them BOINC email things the other day. I read them
but its hard to post to everything but i will try to keep an eye on
that also.

If i spot someone that has volunteered to program the php competition
script, i will work closely with him. David.A if you have spotted
someone that starts working on this, let me know so i can get in touch
with him.

I actively encourage people on this team founders forum to go in and
"Fault Find" on the competition ideas page i built. If you spot
problems, then chat about them in this message so we can fix them. If
you have ideas, edit the page and add them. The page i made is really
simple to edit, no html knowledge required to edit it.

John.