dkt I do not really understand the point. The total number of projects being small, it is very mangeable.
Just tick all the projects you want to receive work from, and untick the function to allow sending other work if the projects you have selected do not have any available.
The only risk is that if none of the projects that are ticked, have work then your devices will stay idle. That's all.
Hope this solves your problem.

Thank you for the suggestion. We will keep it in mind when we look at changes to this part of the website. One thing to think about is that the interface needs to be easily understood by novice users. If there are options that involve nested if statements to describe how project selection would work, then it will be challenging to understand.

Another suggestion for this interface is the ability to establish 'weights' for the projects so that you could say run FightAIDS@Home at 75% and Help Conquer Cancer at 25%. There are some prerequisite work that we need to do before we could make this change, but it has the benefit of allowing the behavior you describe. You would be able to assign 99% to your primary focus and then 1% to your 'backup' project.

However, we have a long backlog of work to do so it will be some time before we can address these changes.

We do appreciate the suggestions!

Someone recently mentioned the idea of having a setting to optimise workload for badges. If that were implemented, it could be possible to specify which badges you are aiming for for each selected project - so it stops giving work for that project once the manager knows that the target badge is going to be achieved.

In terms of interface, it doesn't need to be that complicated - In fact, it might be a good idea to have a choice of "basic" and "advanced" settings for projects. The "basic" page could be the same as at the moment, for those who are not concerned about extra settings. The "advanced" page could have boxes to enter the percentages mentioned above, and/or pull-down lists to select the target badges for each desired project. The pull-down lists for each project could also include options like "No work". (If the targest are defined as "xxx dats" and "xxx years", targets beyond the current badges - e.g. "4 years" could also be included.

Perhaps these two advanced settings suggestions compete somewhat - they could be handled by mutually exclusive pages. One could be "Set priorities by percentage"; the other could be "Set priorities by target".

Anyway, I think it would be good to keep a basic page so as not to confuse newcomers.

Maybe we hide the forest for the trees? It is the special setup of WCG that lots (or better - a few ) of projects are handled through a single BOINC project. Remember, BOINC does all you are referring to with the projects you have selected. So it should be a matter of using BOINC the right way to get the percentage ratio in WCG going - if we had the WCG projects as BOINC projects, there would be no issue.

I guess handling the sub-project issue as part of the BOINC development might be a good idea, because then other BOINC projects that have different sub-projects could benefit as well. If I could subscribe into a main project at BOINC, and get attached to all or some sub-projects, that would be nice.

Regards,
Martin

I also remember uplinger (?) mentioning the difference between WCG-side (counting work units) and user-side (counting seconds) and the difficulties that this can cause on the programmer-side.