Reason for not combining two user accounts?

[Peter_Hucker]

All I've found is "a policy F@h adopted at the beginning. Once credited points will not be moved from one username or team to another."

But why? I find it very annoying having to add the score from both my accounts then work out where I would be by looking through the stats. What harm is there in combining two accounts? Subtract the points from the old and add them to the new one.

[PaulTV]

Basically there are no F@h accounts. There are user names, and group names, but no accounts. There is no hard way to prove you're the owner of a user name - there is no authentication, and nothing prevents someone else using the same user name as you are. One could argue that the passkey could be the password, but technically it isn't really. So, if there is no way to prove the ownership, it'd be a doddle to steal the credits from another account.

Besides of that, there are groups that rely on the fact that once credited, the credits (in combination with user name and group name) are immutable, e.g. for awarding crypto.

I suppose it'd be possible to work around all that for future results, but it'd mean a huge overhaul of the whole system, and then what would you do with the already awarded credits from the last couple decades? Also, dev resources are limited, and they will have other priorities.

[Peter_Hucker]

Yes it would have to be proved, but a friendly admin could see two accounts with a similar name and have been using the same IP address and manually move the points.

Crypto, that works on RAC, the RAC shouldn't shoot up if the points are added as historic ones.

[PaulTV]

Does the current system keep track of the IP addresses used for posting results? I doubt it. It would not just mean moving the points, but also the job results that are bound to user names. Moving just the points would cause inconsistencies in the database, and make the statistics worthless. It'd also break sites like Extreme Overclocking, which keeps track of statistics.

There are ways to get the results per user. If you're so interested in tracking multiple accounts, instead of simply using one account, you can create your own web site, and get the results for both accounts, and add them yourself. Doing something like that would give you the functionality you want, and would not cause issues in the system or a whole lotta work for friendly admins who would be spammed, or devs to make the tools to facilitate it all.

[Peter_Hucker]

Why would the database care about points? Points are just a number. Joe Bloggs has done this much work.

Why would it break stats databases? It would just see Joe got a big spike in points.

Yeah I'll just create my own website.... far easier just to use a calculator. Add the points from both accounts, then see where that puts me in the big list.

[Joe_H]

Who is this "friendly admin" you think will be available to do such comparisons? There isn't a designated person beyond the developer who maintains the database and updates its code to handle handle larger numbers of submissions and requests. So if they were to decide to allow merging, some researcher(s) whether heading the labs or their grad students and post docs would need to handle this. That would take away from their time to do research.

As for your thoughts about not effecting rewards such as crypto, the reports used by groups to track the contributions of individuals are just a summary of how many WUs have been completed and the total points. So if User_A is combined with User_B, suddenly User_B will show up with a much higher number for WUs and total points in the next set of files.

If you want to see what these fils look like, you can download them yourself from the stats main page - https://foldingathome.org/statistics/. They are simple text files, you will see the links on the page as "Donor list (txt)" and "Team list (txt)"

[Peter_Hucker]

Who is this "friendly admin" you think will be available to do such comparisons?

That would be you

There isn't a designated person beyond the developer who maintains the database and updates its code to handle handle larger numbers of submissions and requests. So if they were to decide to allow merging, some researcher(s) whether heading the labs or their grad students and post docs would need to handle this. That would take away from their time to do research.

I'm guessing it's not something there would be a lot of requests for. My case was unusual, I changed to Gridcoin.

As for your thoughts about not effecting rewards such as crypto, the reports used by groups to track the contributions of individuals are just a summary of how many WUs have been completed and the total points. So if User_A is combined with User_B, suddenly User_B will show up with a much higher number for WUs and total points in the next set of files.

They're only coins, and not something the project should care about. I might receive an extra dollar, big deal. Those coins are worthless and a token gesture, like vouchers in a supermarket. And anyway, all those points you would move from my old account never earned any gridcoins, so I'm due them anyway!

[Joe_H]

Who is this "friendly admin" you think will be available to do such comparisons?

That would be you

I am not volunteering for that, I have enough to do just keeping the spammers out of this forum. Besides, I don't have any more access to the database than any other user of F@h. What used to be restricted apps for forum moderators and a fw others are available to all from here - https://apps.foldingathome.org. Some of these apps were public before, but the WU status, last WU, and bonus status apps used to require a privileged account to use.

[toTOW]

As far as I remember, here are a few reasons for that feature to not exist :
- FAH stat system doesn't have accounts by design. It might be considered as a flaw, but FAH has to handle million of users, and such feature would cost a lot in storage or compute power for the database.
- Allowing the merge of usernames might open the pandora box of any cheats or point thefts
- The project doesn't have the manpower to dedicate to such tasks.

[Peter_Hucker]

Why do you keep saying there are no accounts? I can look up mine right here: https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/n ... 25a7dc4492
https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/n ... bczu2EgFyR

PeterHucker_GRC_53ed9d9b7d568cb7eb1ccc25a7dc4492 is my new account.
PeterHucker_1HK9mWMp2xTK3f7fjowi1mCCbczu2EgFyR was my old account.

[Joe_H]

Neither of those are accounts with F@h. There is no registration, verification, or other means of tying either of them to a particular person. Anyone could, but few would, copy those usernames and start folding. Anyone could also claim to be the owner, and it would be hard to disprove it as there nothing registered.

Now the wallet ID is used as an account by the teams that award cryptocurrency, but again that is not an account with F@h.

For simpler usernames there are many duplicates and no means of identifying owners. For example the username I use - Joe_H - has been used by at least 3 or 4 others. I know which points are mine because I know which teams my username was used with. However I did get some points donated my direction from someone thanking me who folded for a while with my username and team set in their client.

[Peter_Hucker]

So it's an unsecure badly designed account. But it's still an account. Pretty daft actually having no system to check if it's already in use. With Boinc I log in. So much easier for example when they're tracing what's going wrong with work units on particular machines owned by a particular person. If this was Boinc, I could click your username in your post, see your list of attached computers, and see what workunits they did. Very useful for troubleshooting.

[Lazvon]

Because it doesn’t really matter. With coins, even if barely worth anything there is still more “monetary value” than points here. Points here just gives an idea of how much we have relatively contributed to great research causes that otherwise would be seeking and waiting for larger grants to use dedicated research compute power.

If you know what your old name was and the unique team it was (if there are multiples of your name), you have that internal sense of contribution. You might want to make it more widely know about it… I took time to celebrate I am #95 a little after two years of joining, because I am proud to have been in a position in life to contribute as much as I have, and it is pretty cool to have been able to achieve that… but I still would have done it without the slight gamification of “usernames” and “teams”.

I don’t know how to help the conversation. You should be doing this for helping researchers who would be waiting for time in dedicated research systems of this wasn’t available. Anyone supporting making this more “organized” other than volunteers like Joe, is taking away from research time. This is good enough to get things done and let research happen sooner than it would have. Yay!

[Peter_Hucker]

I too do this for the sake of science (those coins are pitiful in value and I'm not sure why they bothered making them, better than Bitcoin I suppose). I just like watching my position climb up so I know I'm contributing a lot. It also alerts me to problems, if a machine isn't running efficiently or is corrupting work units, I'd notice my stats fall off.

[Joe_H]

So it's an unsecure badly designed account. But it's still an account. Pretty daft actually having no system to check if it's already in use. With Boinc I log in. So much easier for example when they're tracing what's going wrong with work units on particular machines owned by a particular person. If this was Boinc, I could click your username in your post, see your list of attached computers, and see what workunits they did. Very useful for troubleshooting.

You can call it an account all you want to, that doesn't make it so. That was an explicit choice made by F@h when it started over 20 years ago. The F@h website does have an utility to check if a username is already in use, but it was and probably is still a case sensitive check. There is nothing that registers a name chosen to a specific person, and nothing preventing its reuse by another. By choosing this method F@h does not have to deal with lost or compromised passwords, or a whole range of other problems connected with tracking and maintaining accounts.

You can request that F@h create such accounts and allow merging, the researchers mostly follow the Discord channels and Twitter. But I doubt it will happen. Someone shows up here avery couple years asking for the same, that has not budged them from the initial decision made long ago.

As for this topic, it is going nowhere useful, I am locking it.