Where to post UI suggestions?

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Profile ITgreybeard
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Joined: 22 Dec 10
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Message 86999 - Posted: 10 Jul 2018, 20:00:03 UTC

It is unclear to me where BOINC might be accepting suggestions from the non-developer community. Perhaps someone can guide me to the appropriate forum.

My post would be as follows below:

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In the "advanced" user interface, we are shown three time fields: elapsed, remaining and deadline. When consulting the UI, I often sort by deadline, particularly if my workstation has been in the 'off' position for several hours or days. BOINC seems often to be smart enough to realize whether 'now + remaining <= deadline', but does not always immediately abort tasks that don't meet that criteria/ion/ium.

Could I suggest that an additional display field be available, especially for those of us who are not running all machines 24x365? That field would be 'slack time', computed as 'deadline - remaining - now.' The resultant value lets a person such as myself know easily whether there is likely to be sufficient time to bring a machine down for maintenance or such, without discarding the already-accomplished BOINC computations as a part of a still-running work task, but while still meeting the deadline. i.e. It answers the question of whether (positive) slack time value is sufficient to resume a BOINC task once maintenance or away-time is complete. If the user foresees it to not be adequate, the user can abort the task(s) early, and BOINC can perhaps know early enough to assign it/them to another user.

I realize that, with the current (now) time available elsewhere in the computer interface, the underlying values are already shown to us in the BOINC advanced interface, but time values as shown are hardly in convenient for decimal form arithmetic. And I could see that it could be valuable to a running project, to be notified in advance of an impending deadline miss, via a user aborting the tasks beforehand; the user's brain - however large or small - might be the only receptacle for the knowledge of vacations and maintenance and such, and the only one to make/take that decision.

This is hardly a high-priority development issue, but neither does it appear to be a difficult one. Has anyone else had this notion? In any case, thanks for the consideration.
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Profile Dave
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Message 87039 - Posted: 11 Jul 2018, 5:56:50 UTC

but does not always immediately abort tasks that don't meet that criteria/ion/ium.


At least one project (CPDN) does not use the deadline and will accept tasks finished after the deadline. In fact it only puts one in for the tasks because BOINC insists on it. I think the automagical deletion of tasks past the deadline is implemented at the project end but I could be confabulating about that.
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Message boards : Questions and problems : Where to post UI suggestions?

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