Hi Erica,

I nearly commented a couple of days ago when I first saw links to this from the "My Contribution" page containing both the recruiterId and teamId parameters -- as I suggested some time ago. Very many thanks for implementing this! I've already changed my e-mail signature to include this link!

I think the concept is excellent and I really hope that it encourages people to start volunteering. My only queries are to do with security and parameter passing.

When switching from discover.action to join.action I was surprised not to see the parameters passed on and I couldn't see anything in cookies -- I'm hoping that the information is held on the host and associated with the user session.

Similarly, I was surprised that the join.action wasn't under https so as to protect the user information requested. Again, I'm hoping that https is used under the covers and I just can't see it, but it's not very comforting if the user can't see "the padlock". I found that I could use https for the initial link and so this is what I've used in my e-mail footer ...

Thanks again!

We are capturing that information using HTML session storage or on the server session. Eventually the only cookies you will see on our site will the session and the security token cookies.


Yes - you can use either https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org or https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org without issue. Additionally, the API calls made under the covers are all on https. We will take a look at forcing /join.action over to being https at the top level to provide the reassurance that is important.

Erika: Looks great! Wondering if in the future it could be extended to include info on the advantages of corporate/educational/etc partners getting involved in promoting WCG? (Or perhaps have a separate one for prospective partners to read)

thx!

I have to agree with this. People who get excited about WCG and start to participate are going to notice the difference, especially on laptops. They're going to notice how much hotter their machines get, as one example.

And since I don't think most laptop users ever clean their fan/hs, the extra heat is very likely going to cause problems over the longer, if not short term. The last thing you want is to have someone have to take their computer in for servicing because of thermal faults only for the technician to tell them that BOINC is what is causing the problem.

Not everyone out there is a sophisticated user and not being honest about the heat issue up front is only cause people to feel betrayed when they find out.

In terms of how to present this, there's no way to sugar coat it. It's better to be completely honest about the potential issues rather than try to paper them over.

edit: oh, and btw, if this is really a serious attempt to bring in new users, this forum software is going to scare people away, especially when you have such a slick presentation. It's like drawing people in with a full page glossy ad only to have them find out that any actual interaction only occurs by fax.

edit2: Related to that is the 700k figure that is posted right at the top of the presentation. We all know that this is a lie since we only have maybe 60-70k active users. I'm not going to get all self-righteous about this except to say that anytime you have that alleged number of users, people are going to be expecting a lot more people contributing to the forum.

Of course it's an open question as to how many will join and never look at the forum, but I have to believe that most will at least be curious about what kind of community we have here and what they'll find isn't going to jive with that 700k figure.