I was just looking through my tasks and saw another inconclusive. Was it me or the wingman? In this case, the wingman has returned several bad units so I think the odds are it isn't me. What caught my eye was they did a SoB unit. 1.8M seconds, or near enough 3 weeks. Invalid. That's gotta hurt, if they were aware of it.

That made me think, what are the default settings for new users? Can they get anything, including SoB units? If so, I'm wondering if the longer projects (say, units taking days on a fast computer) might best default to not selected when a new user joins. Shorter units would present less risk, and if they like to stick around and get more advanced they can opt-in to longer units when they are ready.

Well, this would work if majority of users do change their preferences.
BOINC is designed/promised to work with "attach and forget" approach.

Otherwise, longer projects would get much less share.
In a long, shorter projects would catch-up with longer ones.
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My stats
Badge score: 1*1 + 5*1 + 8*3 + 9*11 + 10*1 + 11*1 + 12*3 = 186

The defaults are set to ESP-SIEVE for CPU tasks and PPS-SIEVE for GPU tasks.
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My lucky number is 75898⁵²⁴²⁸⁸+1

Nice to hear. So if someone is doing a bit of everything, they must have chosen that at some point? Or perhaps have first joined so long ago that defaults may be different then?

Nice to hear. So if someone is doing a bit of everything, they must have chosen that at some point? Or perhaps have first joined so long ago that defaults may be different then?

It seems that the system was only applying the defaults for new users if they created the account via the BOINC manager GUI. If you created the account from the web page you got no defaults and thus could be sent anything. I've changed the web page to also allow apply the defaults to accounts created via the web.

Also, to clarify what I said before, the default GPU app is indeed PPS-SIEVE, however new users don't have GPU computing turned on by default. They need to turn that on themselves in the preferences page. New users should only be running ESP-Sieve until they change the preferences themselves.
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My lucky number is 75898⁵²⁴²⁸⁸+1

In addition to changing the defaults to new accounts, I have also retroactively changed the project preferences for all users who have never set their own preferences. Note that this change ONLY applies to people who have never set any preferences. If you've ever set any PrimeGrid preferences, nothing was changed.

Chances are, if you've never set any preferences, you either don't know that there are preferences to be set, don't know how to change them, or don't care what tasks you get.

I therefore suspect that most people whom this will affect won't notice any difference, mostly because they're not paying attention to what their computer is doing at PrimeGrid. Perhaps they might notice that it's no longer running absurdly long tasks, which they'll likely appreciate.

If you are affected by this, and prefer the old "send me anything at random" behavior, just go to the project preferences page and select all the CPU sub-projects.


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My lucky number is 75898⁵²⁴²⁸⁸+1

Nice updates :)