24 replies to this topic

[MichaelGR]

Hey everybody,

I know I haven't been here long, but hear me out:

I've been told that one of the goals (along with simply helping science by crunching) of the longevity meme F@H team was to gain visibility. By climbing the ranks, more people will see the team and might discover SENS and the fight against aging.

Well, I was looking at the stats, and I've noticed that many teams use URLs as their names, and that's a much better way to get people to check your website. On Extreme Overclocking, you don't even see a link to longevitymeme.org at all, and I think more people are using the nicer stats on that site than the basic stats on the official stanford site (and even there, you have to click on the name to see the URL, can't see it from the list).

So my proposal is:

Changing from "The Longevity Meme" to "LongevityMeme.org"

I know it doesn't look quite as good, but if it brings more people to that site, it'll be all worth it IMO.

Thoughts?

[dnamechanic]

So my proposal is:

Changing from "The Longevity Meme" to "LongevityMeme.org"...

Thoughts?

Good thinking, MichaelGR.

The main problem is that Stanford does not allow name changes for teams or members. There have been very good reasons presented to the F@H organization for a contributor or team name change. The Pande group maintains the policy of no changes in records.

If the team decided to change the name, that would effectively be the same as starting a new team with the new name.

The current stats for "The Longevity Meme" would stand, and the new team would start with *zero points* and *zero contributions* at the bottom of the rankings.

The current name is pretty good. Anyone very interested can find ImmInst or The Longevity Meme with a quick search. That is about as as easy as copying and pasting a URL.

[chungenhung]

yeah, changing the name of the team would mean starting over from zero.
I know that people can google it, but there are a lot of people that don't know how. pretty sad.
I am neutral on the issue.

[MichaelGR]

I did not know that the name couldn't be changed.

The more I learn about Folding@home's interface (as opposed to the science itself), the more I am disappointed.

Weird that they can be so cutting edge in one area while being so 1990s in the other...

I still think that if it ever became possible to change the name WITHOUT losing everything, that it would be a good idea.

Oh well...

[reason]

No objection from me if people can find a way to get Stanford to change the name, but it sounds like we're stuck with my poor choice.

[MichaelGR]

The current name is pretty good. Anyone very interested can find ImmInst or The Longevity Meme with a quick search. That is about as as easy as copying and pasting a URL.

The problem is not that it's impossible to find, but every barrier to entry reduces the number of people who will end up to the site by quite a large amount (maybe an order of magnitude).

f.ex. Only a small subset of people looking at the team rankings are curious enough to check out sites, and only a small subset of those will think about looking up things that don't look like URLs. Changing the name would remove that last barrier. Alas, it might not be possible, but could be worth trying.

Has anyone here had contacts with the FAH ppl? I've exchanged a few emails with Professor Pande, but I'm not sure it's worth bothering him for that. Maybe there's someone below him who deals more directly with community management/server stats stuff/etc..

[brokenportal]

I saw this topic and then we talked about it at the fah meeting today, imminst.org/meetings

This is a horrible scenerio your right, we have a successful team with an awsome marketing opportunity here and its being wasted, its like getting free billboard space and pasting our ad on a one foot by one foot section in the corner of it.

We need somebody to sign up to take the time to do some high pressure tactful salesmanship of the idea to pande. Even ask them if there is a price they would take to do it. If the name cant be changed, then ask if they can at least give each team a spot in their individual statistics page, when you click on the team name in the rankings, to put personalized blurbs in, that shouldnt be to much to ask at all, and should become the focus of a high pressure salesmanship effort if they say absolutely not (for whatever reason I cant conceive of) to the name change. Then we could put a blurb in the link at our team. As it stands we can see the top twenty producers for our team via our teams name link. We should consider at least, especially if nothing else, getting more of those top twenty ppd producers to switch to names like "Immortality Institute" "Methuselah Foundation" "Longevitymeme.com" etc...

[brokenportal]

No objection from me if people can find a way to get Stanford to change the name, but it sounds like we're stuck with my poor choice.

Its very easy to see how you wouldnt have expected it to go this far at that time. Since your the creator of the team maybe it would be best for you to try to do some "high pressure" salesmanship if you have time. Maybe see what price they might take for it, we could raise the money most likely. And if at all, see about a blurb area in the team stats page.

[MichaelGR]

I think the best first move is to find out what the situation is. Once we know how hard/easy changing the name would be, or if it's on the future roadmap of features for FAH, or whatever, then we can plan what kind of moves we want to make to try to achieve this.

Going straight into a sales pitch without knowing the metaphorical lay of the land would probably not be as effective.

I think FAH would probably be sympathetic to the idea that we're trying to make our contribution to their project more humanitarian, but they're probably afraid of a flood of people then asking for name changes (which could be a problem if they have to do them by hand in some clunky way). If that's the case, maybe we can ask for them to add name changing as a feature the next time they update their backend (even if it takes a while, better than never), and if even that doesn't seem to appeal to them, we could look into exchanging it for some kind of donation to FAH or something like that.

[brokenportal]

I think the best first move is to find out what the situation is. Once we know how hard/easy changing the name would be, or if it's on the future roadmap of features for FAH, or whatever, then we can plan what kind of moves we want to make to try to achieve this.

Good idea, can you put in the time? Ide take it on but my plate is full. We could add it to a list of goals and when complete it would make for a great peice to add to imminsts list of successes for 2009. I would give it a goal time of the whole year. Its worth that much effort. Theres a thing in sales that says people usually dont buy on the first or second or third try, its usually like the 15th or the 20th. I think it would work. I think that where theres a will theres a way here. This could go a long way toward saving lives by getting this cause to spread faster, its big.

Check into the back end of programing if they would do something there like you said, and consider the money thing. Also try to anticipate their objections and counter them ahead of time, like, try to have a counter arguement to, "well then everybody is going to want to change their names and sponsors will be paying teams for their names and it will be a mess." One strategy might be to get them to support our cause and to get them to do it in the name of the cause, the lives it could save. If you dont want to try to get them to do it yourself directly then consider outlining a list of stuff like this in the projects list in the google doc or wiki. (rough draft in doc, official project in wiki) theres going to be a ryme and reason to the order of things in the wiki eventually, next couple months, so you may want to start with the doc. Send me a pm if your interested.

[Live Forever]

I can see why they don't allow name changes. How would you determine when a name change was warranted? If you had a team of 200 people, and a few wanted to change the name, would you have to get the consent of all 200 people? (not our team specifically, I am just talking about any F@H team) Would you hold a vote? This isn't even taking into account the 3rd party people who report stats. You would have to let them know to change the already accumulated stats to a new name. Seems like a lot of unnecessary headaches when they are trying to just do science; I can see why they don't allow name changes.

Edited by Live Forever, 26 December 2008 - 04:09 AM.

[kismet]

I can see why they don't allow name changes. How would you determine when a name change was warranted? If you had a team of 200 people, and a few wanted to change the name, would you have to get the consent of all 200 people?

Is there no team leader? Like the first person to join the team, I am sure there must be some kind of leader who could decide. If peple are not pleased, they can join another team. Problem solved.

I can see why they don't allow name changes.

I really can't.

A name change once a year (or every two years or whatever) wouldn't hurt anyone and should involve only minimal work for Pande.

Edited by kismet, 26 December 2008 - 02:13 PM.

[brokenportal]

I can see why they don't allow name changes. How would you determine when a name change was warranted? If you had a team of 200 people, and a few wanted to change the name, would you have to get the consent of all 200 people?

Is there no team leader? Like the first person to join the team, I am sure there must be some kind of leader who could decide. If peple are not pleased, they can join another team. Problem solved.

I can see why they don't allow name changes.

I really can't.

A name change once a year (or every two years or whatever) wouldn't hurt anyone and should involve only minimal work for Pande.

Reason here who responded in this topic there recently, post #5, started the Longevity Meme folding team. He cant change it either though, and changing teams wouldnt solve the problem. The idea is to try to get it to say longevitymeme.com so that the tons and tons of people who see us in the top 100 will check out the cause. They asked Pande and he said they wont change names for some reason, but I think that where theres a high pressure tactful salesman to get .com added, with possibly some cash, and a will, theres a way.

Edited by brokenportal, 26 December 2008 - 06:00 PM.

[MichaelGR]

Teams are identified by numbers. It wouldn't be too hard to set it up so that third parties track teams by their numbers, not names (if that's not already the case).

Distributed computing is based on volunteers donating CPU cycles. The more that the project does to give these volunteers what they want and make it easy for them to participate, the more they'll donate and stick around (imagine how much CPU power FAH would have if their client was more user-friendly (no command lines, log files to check, third party apps required, a central control panel for all settings, etc). I've been crunching for 10 years and had trouble setting it up properly on my machine, so tons of newbies must give up)...

I think that FAH's goal should be to empower teams to do what they want without putting that responsibility on the project. Having team owners have some admin powers (like in BOINC, afaik) would make sense; people wouldn't come to the project with all kind of requests, they'd go to these owners, and the owners would be incentivized not to be assholes because if they are, they're going to lose all their best crunchers.

But that might require some backend changes. That should be Plan B, as it would take longer. Plan A should be to ask them if it's possible to just change it, maybe in exchange for a donation to the project to compensate for their trouble.

Edited by MichaelGR, 26 December 2008 - 06:15 PM.

[brokenportal]

Teams are identified by numbers. It wouldn't be too hard to set it up so that third parties track teams by their numbers, not names (if that's not already the case).

Distributed computing is based on volunteers donating CPU cycles. The more that the project does to give these volunteers what they want and make it easy for them to participate, the more they'll donate and stick around (imagine how much CPU power FAH would have if their client was more user-friendly (no command lines, log files to check, third party apps required, no central control panel, etc). I've been crunching for 10 years and had trouble setting it up properly on my machine, so tons of newbies must give up)...

I think that FAH's goal should be to empower teams to do what they want without putting that responsibility on the project. Having team owners have some admin powers (like in BOINC, afaik) would make sense; people wouldn't come to the project with all kind of requests, they'd go to these owners, and the owners would be incentivized not to be assholes because if they are, they're going to lose all their best crunchers.

But that might require some backend changes. That should be Plan B, as it would take longer. Plan A should be to ask them if it's possible to just change it, maybe in exchange for a donation to the project to compensate for their trouble.

Thats funny, you use the word "incentivized" too.

Outline points to go over, plan a. b. c. etc.. list pro and cons and stuff and not anything else in the same bulleted summarized format on line 29 here, you (if you want, hopefully you want) and anybody else here. Send me your email and Ill ad you as an editor.

[Heliotrope]

how about longevitymeme.org/imminst.org

[sentinel]

how about longevitymeme.org/imminst.org

I've been meaning to raise this. If we are going to change the name why are we not talking Imminst.org? If this is about publicity for "the cause" then why not point it to the most effective vehicle ie this site? I also think people joining our team would find it more relevant as it directly promotes a team spirit afterall, if you took a poll of how many people knew what a meme was you would get a pretty low result.

If it is a big deal to push through (if possible at all) then it is surely not worth the effort if we are only achieving an incremental benefit.

[dnamechanic]

...If we are going to change the name why are we not talking Imminst.org?

1. Reason, founder of The Longevity Meme currently matches funding with ImmInst for the F@H prize.

2. The Longevity Meme team has a relatively long history (if I recall correctly, originated in 2003).

3. There are more than 400 folders that have signed on with the Longevity Meme team.

(The majority are not registered with ImmInst. Or, if registered, use a different username.)

Maybe some of the Longevity Meme folders like the team name that they signed on with.

If this is about publicity for "the cause" then why not point it to the most effective vehicle ie this site?

The Longevity Meme has been quite effective in supporting healthy life extension.

For example: Some of the high-dollar donors to the Methuselah Foundation came in through reading the Longevity Meme.

I also think people joining our team would find it more relevant as it directly promotes a team spirit ...

A larger, and broader, team spirit is demonstrated when ImmInst (organization and contributors) and The Longevity Meme (organization and contributors) cooperate together to achieve a common goals.

...afterall, if you took a poll of how many people knew what a meme was you would get a pretty low result.

How many people do you think know what an ImmInst is?

If it is a big deal to push through (if possible at all) then it is surely not worth the effort if we are only achieving an incremental benefit.

The entire Life Extension movement is relative small and on the fringe. Activists would do well to choose battles carefully.

Before confronting the F@H program about their longstanding records policies, it might be good to read the history related to this topic in the Folding Forums. The current Folding Forums contain only about one year of history. Most of the original folding forums can be found in an archive going back to ~2004 (in the archive, it is hard to navigate).

[Heliotrope]

how about longevitymeme.org/imminst.org

I've been meaning to raise this. If we are going to change the name why are we not talking Imminst.org? If this is about publicity for "the cause" then why not point it to the most effective vehicle ie this site? I also think people joining our team would find it more relevant as it directly promotes a team spirit afterall, if you took a poll of how many people knew what a meme was you would get a pretty low result.

If it is a big deal to push through (if possible at all) then it is surely not worth the effort if we are only achieving an incremental benefit.

I read the posts. Respect DNAmechanic, but what name change I suggested is a joint-venture, both LM.org and imminst.org, and putting TLM team name first. It'll direct ppl to both sites instead of one.

heck can even go LM/MF/ImmInst.org fah team

[kismet]

I think our best bet would be to lobby the guys from extremeoverclocking, their stats are the most visible and influential and they just parse and present the data from Stanford AFAIK. So in theory they could change our name without much of a hassle. I'll see what I can do, as soon as I have more time.

[sentinel]

...If we are going to change the name why are we not talking Imminst.org?

1. Reason, founder of The Longevity Meme currently matches funding with ImmInst for the F@H prize.

2. The Longevity Meme team has a relatively long history (if I recall correctly, originated in 2003).

3. There are more than 400 folders that have signed on with the Longevity Meme team.

(The majority are not registered with ImmInst. Or, if registered, use a different username.)

Maybe some of the Longevity Meme folders like the team name that they signed on with.

If this is about publicity for "the cause" then why not point it to the most effective vehicle ie this site?

The Longevity Meme has been quite effective in supporting healthy life extension.

For example: Some of the high-dollar donors to the Methuselah Foundation came in through reading the Longevity Meme.

I also think people joining our team would find it more relevant as it directly promotes a team spirit ...

A larger, and broader, team spirit is demonstrated when ImmInst (organization and contributors) and The Longevity Meme (organization and contributors) cooperate together to achieve a common goals.

...afterall, if you took a poll of how many people knew what a meme was you would get a pretty low result.

How many people do you think know what an ImmInst is?

If it is a big deal to push through (if possible at all) then it is surely not worth the effort if we are only achieving an incremental benefit.

The entire Life Extension movement is relative small and on the fringe. Activists would do well to choose battles carefully.

Before confronting the F@H program about their longstanding records policies, it might be good to read the history related to this topic in the Folding Forums. The current Folding Forums contain only about one year of history. Most of the original folding forums can be found in an archive going back to ~2004 (in the archive, it is hard to navigate).

OK so I think we can put you in the "no" camp!

[dnamechanic]

Stanford has an option available to change team names.

http://fah-web.stanf...n/changeteam.pl

The founder can do this.

Fairly sure that Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme team.

No details as to what, if any, the side effects are.

Edited by dnamechanic, 19 March 2009 - 02:01 AM.

[sentinel]

Stanford has an option available to change team names.

http://fah-web.stanf...n/changeteam.pl

The founder can do this.

Fairly sure that Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme team.

No details as to what, if any, the side effects are.

Well, I left this alone as it's not my place to go shouting name changes, but who thinks it's a good idea. Be that as an "upgrade" to longevitymeme.org or whatever...?

[brokenportal]

Is that name change option new? Lets do this then. Is somebody on it, contacting Reason about this?

Are any of you guys in the folding forums at all? Some constant subtle long term lobbying for our folding team, advertising that its for a cause and for money, might get whole teams to switch over to our team. I mean, I wouldnt go around asking people to join our team or switch their whole team, but I think that suggesting it and touting the benefits and the importance of it all might rub off well over the next 5 months or so.

Lets add this to the internetworking team. If you guys want to start a couple topics in the folding forums then link them in the internetworking team forums list here: http://www.imminst.o...networking_Team and the team will help you by putting positive comments in the topics periodically.

[sentinel]

Is that name change option new? Lets do this then. Is somebody on it, contacting Reason about this?

Are any of you guys in the folding forums at all? Some constant subtle long term lobbying for our folding team, advertising that its for a cause and for money, might get whole teams to switch over to our team. I mean, I wouldnt go around asking people to join our team or switch their whole team, but I think that suggesting it and touting the benefits and the importance of it all might rub off well over the next 5 months or so.

Lets add this to the internetworking team. If you guys want to start a couple topics in the folding forums then link them in the internetworking team forums list here: http://www.imminst.o...networking_Team and the team will help you by putting positive comments in the topics periodically.

Check out the Super User thread too, I've switched my name to www.imminst.org with the intention of others folding under the same USER name to create a high ranking marketing effort in the individual user tables.

http://www.imminst.o...showtopic=28211