We have a major problem with the upcoming migration.

Our team (Unisys) was founded by a guy named Tim Radde, way back in the early days; but Tim has long ago left the company. And although I have been able to contact him, he has long forgotten what his SETI@Home password was. Furthermore, his Unisys email address is of course no longer valid, and in a company of tens of thousands of email-enabled employees, the email admins (understanably) do not look kindly on requests to be 'creative' with email addresses.

We are currently 7th in the Large Company Teams grouping, with a very respecable 1.5m+ results; but from what I understand, all of this will go down the tubes at the transfer cut-off time to BOINC, as there will be no reply to the mail sent to the registered email address of the founder.

PLEASE - is there any way that anyone knows in which we can solve this problem, and rescue our team from oblivion on cut-off date?

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The team has already transferred, and anybody that transfers will be automatically joined to the team in BOINC. Anybody that creates a new account will have to join. You already have 12 members that have transferred or joined after creating a new BOINC account and received credit.

Now, that said, there will be the same difficulty in administering the team that there was administering the classic team.

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BOINC WIKI

I realise that the team has been transferred - but I also saw in the FAQ somewhere (though now I can't find it) that an email was going to be sent to the team founder to verify transfer before the classic S@H site closes - and this is what worried me.

Another worry is that there are a lot of credits in the team belonging to people who have left the company, but who have chosen not to move their accounts - presumably feeling it's only fair to leave them in the team where they were earned. This is bound to be common with the company teams as people change jobs. As I understand it, the BOINC team will lose those accumulated credits. This means there's going to be a major revolution in the standings when the switchover comes ...

There is also the problem that you have pointed out, that it's impossible to administer the team with the founder departed.

It would be good to have some sort of safety net for founders going AWOL - there must be others with this problem, especially in the company teams. How about an option that would allow a replacement founder to volunteer, then the system sends a standard form email (so the volunteer couldn't put in anything unacceptable) to the registered founder, and allow the transfer of control if there is no reply within some standard time? Then, if you think it necessary, email all members and require a majority of those replying to agree?

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> I realise that the team has been transferred - but I also saw in the FAQ
> somewhere (though now I can't find it) that an email was going to be sent to
> the team founder to verify transfer before the classic S@H site closes - and
> this is what worried me.

I believe that everyone was going to get an email telling them that it was time to switch over.
>
> Another worry is that there are a lot of credits in the team belonging to
> people who have left the company, but who have chosen not to move their
> accounts - presumably feeling it's only fair to leave them in the team where
> they were earned. This is bound to be common with the company teams as people
> change jobs. As I understand it, the BOINC team will lose those accumulated
> credits. This means there's going to be a major revolution in the standings
> when the switchover comes ...

The Classic WU counts are not going to be translated into BOINC CS for anyone. Everyone starts from scratch.
>
> There is also the problem that you have pointed out, that it's impossible to
> administer the team with the founder departed.

Yes, but I don't have a solution for this except to either petition one of the developers, or wait for some sort of solution.
>
> It would be good to have some sort of safety net for founders going AWOL -
> there must be others with this problem, especially in the company teams. How
> about an option that would allow a replacement founder to volunteer, then the
> system sends a standard form email (so the volunteer couldn't put in anything
> unacceptable) to the registered founder, and allow the transfer of control if
> there is no reply within some standard time? Then, if you think it necessary,
> email all members and require a majority of those replying to agree?
>
I agree that something like this would be a good idea, but I have not gotten any response from the developers. I know of at least one team where the founder was discovered to have passed away suddenly (I have no idea of the cause) six months after the fact. In that case nobody had any idea what the founder password was.

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BOINC WIKI