I have 26 of those "validate errors" all reported 11 May 18:53:40 UTC.

I wonder if that matches today's Technical News:

... some result uploads were failing for a minute or two there.

Validate errors and bad uploads usually go together.

Edit: I had half-a-dozen at 11 May 2009 18:51:13 UTC.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=435875813

I reported the above WU earlier when only 3 inconclusive results had been returned. The 4th result is now in and credit has been granted to 3 of the 4. Since mine was one of the lucky 3, I'm not complaining; but, I wonder why it wasn't settled with "the best 2 out of 3".

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http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=435875813

I reported the above WU earlier when only 3 inconclusive results had been returned. The 4th result is now in and credit has been granted to 3 of the 4. Since mine was one of the lucky 3, I'm not complaining; but, I wonder why it wasn't settled with "the best 2 out of 3".

It's not 'the best 2...", it requires 2 with signals which fully match. There's even a possibility that in 11 'success' result files no pair will match and no host will be granted credit, though the odds against that are ridiculously high.

Without a real match they'd have to guess which set of signals to put in the science database. The host records do have an error_rate field which might be used to choose which host is more likely correct, but it wouldn't be very good science.

                                                                Joe

Found some "validate error"s from ca. 11 May 2009 18:50:57 UTC
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=438442777
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=438353803
Hopefully the database is not "leaking" too much of our results.

Two bits of good news:

1) Those WUs, and one of mine, have all been validated (my other ones were all shorties, so they must have been purged already). Looks like the clean-up crew have been busy - thanks again.

2) There was a website bug which meant you couldn't find these errors using the list filters. Any future ones will be included in the "Invalid" category, so they will be easier to find and report. ([trac]changeset:18104[/trac] - thanks David)