Change request for change of wording in the BOINC Manager GUI, currently: 'Account creation is disabled'

[abowery]

Change requested:
Is it possible that in the BOINC Manager 'Add account' popup a link to the project website or a statement saying something like: 'Account creation through the client is disabled, please first create an account through the and then try to reattach to the project' could be added to this'. The current statement is: 'Account creation is disabled'.

Context:
In climateprediction.net we now have account creation disabled through the BOINC Manager. When new volunteers download the BOINC client on to their machines and then try to attach to the climateprediction.net using the 'Add account' popup and if they don't have an existing account, they are met with the message 'Account creation is disabled' with no link or explanation of how to create a new account. I think we are currently losing a lot of new volunteers through this.

[AenBleidd]

@abowery, currently BOINC client can't determine why account creation was failed. The message you see on this screen sent directly from the server. But we can't rely on this message because it could be localized with localization that is different from the one used by client. Therefore it is impossible to determine the reason why account creation was failed and show the message you mentioned above.
So this should be one on server side only. You can try to customize this message on your own server to make things faster

[davidpanderson]

The central problem is that the server code (PHP) confuses
"account creation disabled" and
"account creation via RPC disabled".
In the latter case the user should be directed to the web site to create an account.
I'll look into fixing this.

[abowery]

Great many thanks for doing this @davidpanderson.

[VeloSteve]

I don't think this is fixed. I have tried three projects so far. One let me create an account but has to work to do. The other two say "Messages from server: Account creation is disabled". Nothing about RPC (which would be cryptic to many) and no suggestion to go through their web site.

If you want to maximize donations of computer time, make it easy, not frustrating.

[AenBleidd]

What projects you are talking about?

[VeloSteve]

So far Rosetta, climateprediction.net and another I have already forgotten. Rosetta has no work to do.

Climateprediction.net could be added after creating an account online, which first required ignoring their entire page of instructions on how to add an account through Boinc. I finally created the account and was able to add the project, only to get no work again. Back to their forums. There has been no Windows work for years, it seems!

There must be a way for projects to publish some metadata you could use to filter projects which your users can actually contribute to. If they don't refresh their metadata, drop them.

[VeloSteve]

One more: RNA World allowed me to create an account, but again there is no work. Is there a list of projects which actually have work to do, and which clients they can run on?

[AenBleidd]

There are a lot of Projects that have a lot of tasks.
You can check some statistics here: https://grafana.kiska.pw/d/boinc/boinc?orgId=1
There is no info about OS, but anyway it could give you some understanding of the projects that always have some tasks to calculate.