Was going to title it credit vs science, or dumb old newbie question - but i guess it'll have to do as is.

i don't understand fully the credit system, other than a way of keeping track of RAC (seems important) and total credits (seems important) - tho I don't understand why, other than as an incentive maybe (scorecard?). One of my earlier questions was answered by saying my result was Canonical for example - which I guess is important too.

I've sporadically crunched on a number of machines from a small office of creative workstations, servers, home gameboxes - with SETI starting in 99, then on to BOINC via WCG, Rosetta I think, folding@home, to now, tho I didn't keep the same username/email or passwords.

I certainly hope that my donation of intermittent and variable "crunch" in this manner has only harmed my credits at worst, and not the projects.

I assume(ed) you have people coming and going in all kinds of varieties and donations, but if the credit system is of some importance that I'm not understanding (important to SETI, or BOINC, NSF, others?) - that's something I'd like to know.

Credits is like the Odometer on a car. It tells how much you have contributed in total.
RAC (Recent Average Credits) is like the speedometer. It tells how fast you are going.
Total Credit and RAC are just a scorecard and a way of tracking machine performance.
As long as the sporadic crunching actually completes some tasks, uploaded, and reported them, you have not harmed anything at all (with the exception of your credit and RAC). Even if you did not complete tasks, upload and report them, you only delayed some work, so not much harm done.

Each Work Unit (WU) is sent to two computers as Tasks. If they validate, one of the results is accepted as the canonical result and stuffed into the master science database. The other task(s) has some minimal information recorded about who did the crunching, and then discarded (the scientific value was in the validation for all except one result from a WU).

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BOINC WIKI

Credits is like the Odometer on a car. It tells how much you have contributed in total.
RAC (Recent Average Credits) is like the speedometer. It tells how fast you are going.
Total Credit and RAC are just a scorecard and a way of tracking machine performance.
As long as the sporadic crunching actually completes some tasks, uploaded, and reported them, you have not harmed anything at all (with the exception of your credit and RAC). Even if you did not complete tasks, upload and report them, you only delayed some work, so not much harm done.

Each Work Unit (WU) is sent to two computers as Tasks. If they validate, one of the results is accepted as the canonical result and stuffed into the master science database. The other task(s) has some minimal information recorded about who did the crunching, and then discarded (the scientific value was in the validation for all except one result from a WU).

Thanks - simple enough. You folks are saints with patience with regards to what "should be obvious" - and/or not firing off immediately "it's in the wiki/faq/search".

Still have a few questions, but will mark this as answered to stay on topic..