Announcements

Edit 25/01/2012: Issues are all fixed now. Let us know if you notice anything else going on!

There’s been something weird going on which has meant that the ‘Single Sign On’ to the forum hasn’t been working, so no one can log in and post.

We think we know what the issue is but have to wait for Vanilla Forums (our forum provider) to get back to us. We’ll keep you posted as we find anything else out.

In the interim you can still read past posts, and can still post comments here on the announcements.

Thanks for your patience everyone!

EDIT: Everyone should have received their emailed update by now, if you didn’t but would like to, then you can sign up manually.

Hi Everyone,

Today marks the 3 month anniversary of our launch and we’re excited to have just sent out our first newsletter to mark the occasion. It will arrive in inboxes over the next few days (the first 2000 of you should have received it already) and is visible online for everyone to read now.

We are planning on doing a short newsletter update like this one every three months, which we’ll always post a link to on the forums, the announcements page, our Facebook and theSkyNet on Twitter, so if you’d rather read it in any of those places than in your email you can unsubscribe (this wont delete your theSkyNet account, will just stop you from receiving emails!)

This quarter’s update includes info on those long-awaited Founding Member Certificates and an update on the data you’re all helping process as well.

Enjoy! All feedback welcome.

Hi folks,
it’s time for us to begin work on a few new elements for theSkyNet dashboard. As well as a new ‘Power Users’ ladder (to keep things competative for those that don’t have half a render farm at their displosal) we’d also like to introduce several new leaderboards that go beyond how much data has been processed over time by a user.

Our hope is that these new leaderboards will allow our non ‘Power Users’ to compete and be recognised for the contribution they make to theSkyNet… after all we value the thousands of single machine users out there because even if you don’t have a big beast of a machine doing work for theSkyNet, collectively your contribution adds up to a lot.

To get your grey matter going, here’s some contenders for new leaderboards…

- duration spent connected to theSkyNet.
- quickest time to get to 100 / 1000 / 10,000 credits.
- slowest time to get to 100 / 1000 / 10,000 credits.
- largest alliance.
- most members signed up to an alliance daily/weekly/monthly.
- most MIPS per day/week/ month
- least MIPS (!)
- most machines contributing to a single account
- most alliance moves in a month (most disloyal)

We’ll also be looking tro introduce some visual tools (graphs!) so you can see how your contribution and the contribution of others change over time.

So if you have a great idea for a leaderboard, post it here (or on the forum thread) and if we think it’s awesome we’ll make it happen!

We’ve modified the Nereus installer to ensure it runs as a low priority background service on your machine. If you’re running the background client and installed it sometime ago, perhaps think about uninstalling and reinstalling from here http://www.theskynet.org/download/index.

(The new ones are the version uploaded on the 31/10/2011)

Thanks for the great suggestions we’ve been getting from theSkyNet community, keep them coming on our forums. As you may have noticed this week we’ve updated the dashboard with a pause button and an indication of how far away you are from your next trophy. We’ve also removed the list of announcemembts from the bottom of the dashboard page and placed the most recent annoucement at the top of the page.

The new pause feature means that you can now halt your contribution to theSkyNet easily, this is especially useful for when you install the background client and want to pause the flow of data for some reason. Maybe you’re using a laptop on a random wifi connection, or maybe you want as much bandwidt as possible for a non SkyNet task on your machine, well now you can now do this easily. Once you click the pause link, located on the Start Button, the current data packet being processed will finish up and allow your account to idle within a few minutes. When you’re ready to begin contributing again you simply click the same link and things will start up the next time theSkyNet server pings your machine and finds it’s available for work.

Let us know what you think of these changes and be sure to keep those suggestions coming in. Thanks for playing your part to discover our Universe.

Hi friendly theSkyNet members, we’re hoping someone out here in theSkyNet land has an answer for a problem we’ve encountered.

We’ve promised a certificate, emailed via pdf, to every founding member (of which there are about 3000) and we have every intention of living up to that promise!

We can create the pdfs, but emailing them out to the right person, all 3000 of them, is a task we cannot do by hand (even sending 100 emails an hour, which would drive anyone mad, would take us more time than we have).

Does anyone have an idea for a solution to our problem? Specifically we need to attach a pdf (the correct pdf) to an email and then send that email all automatically. Preferably the email would also be personalised in the body.

(we all use Macs over here, but have access to PCs if need be) – if it helps we’re also creating the pdfs with InDesign through a mailmerge.

We have the email addresses and names in a database (SQL) and have also exported them to an csv file.

Any suggestions (or even just sending us to someone else who can help) welcome!