United BOINC

So you want to do more for BOINC than just crunching, telling everyone about BOINC and creating links to the BOINC website or UnitedBOINC.com. Well, there's plenty of other stuff you can do. Here you'll find some other things you can do for BOINC and the BOINC projects. If you would like to do something for the United BOINC website, read this article.

Developing BOINC

BOINC is still in development, and they'd like all the help they can get. If you have any programming experience in C++, WxWidgets, PHP and/or MySQL, you can ask on the BOINC development mailing list if they have a task you can do. First you'll need to read the BOINC development process. Start with some minor bugfixes or enhancements, which you can find in the trac bug database. When you are familiar with the source code, you can check out the development projects. Contact the area owner to and say what you want to do and how you want to do it. Work with the area owner to carry out and check in the work.

Thinking about how to enhance BOINC

If you have some great ideas about how to enhance the BOINC manager, client, websites or account managers, you can send them to the BOINC development email list. When you send your ideas there, it might be a good idea to sign up for it as well, as replies are sent to the list as well

Alpha testing

When a new version is released, it needs to be tested thoroughly. So you could sign up to the BOINC alpha mailing list, and contact David Anderson or Rom Walton, as account creation is not enabled. You'll get an e-mail when there is a new version to test. You'll need to download it and run some test on it, and report the results back to Berkeley. This will cost you only a few hours per week.

Becoming a moderator

Every project has a forum, and every forum has rules. Unfortunately there are some people who disobey these rules, e.g. by posting spam. So the projects need moderators who regularly check the forum and remove posts which are not in accordance with the rules. If you want to be a moderator, simply go the forum and ask if they need one. If they do, you get the ability to remove posts and ban users. Of course they will not make just anyone moderator, you'll need to be active in the forum and they need to know you a bit and trust you before you can become one.

Becoming a BOINC help volunteer

BOINC is quite complex software so they created a live help page where you can get help from BOINC help volunteers. If you have some experience with BOINC and know how to solve some simple problems, you can become a volunteer and help people trying to use BOINC. To become a help volunteer you'll need to read this page and after that sign up here. Your Skype needs to be configured so it can show your status on the web. To do this go to Tools > Options > Privacy and check "Allow my status to be shown on the web". If you have a problem from a volunteer you can't solve, you can find help in the BOINC helpers mailing list. You should sign up for this list so you can also help other volunteers who can't solve a problem.

Translating web pages and GUI text

The BOINC GUI and web pages can be translated into any language. If there is no translator for your language you can become a translator by This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Then you need to obtain the en.po translation file thruogh SVN, and translate the text in the file. Then you can sign up for the BOINC translation and localization email list and mail the file there. As the manager and web pages are dynamic, you'll need to update your file regularly. You can translate the BOINC website itself and the standard text for projects. You can also contact individual projects and translate the project specific texts.

If you know other ways to help out BOINC or the BOINC projects, feel free chat about them on the forum and we can add them to this page 

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