From the Setiusa website (for public distribution):

Over the last few days, there has been quite a number of discussions regarding the current BOINC credit model, as well as several proposals for new models to follow. While some of the discussion has taken place on the boinc_projects list, many of these discussions have occurred on IRC, multiple project/team/BOINC forums, or personal email. In the interest of time, clarity, and the ability to hear many views in a single arena, the staff of Riesel Sieve and I would like to extend an invitation to a BOINC Credit Community Discussion on Monday, January 21st. This discussion will be held via irc on irc.freenode.net, in the channel #boinc-credit.

In the interest of having the discussion at a time conducive to all, we will be hosting two discussions, at 2pm US Eastern Time and 8pm US Eastern Time. Please consider attending either or both. The logs from each will also be posted on the Riesel Sieve website shortly afterward, to allow those who could not attend the opportunity to review the transcript.

I think the only way that we can come to a true solution to the crediting situation is through a thorough discussion (or series of discussions) in a real-time format, not over email. Again, anyone from the BOINC community, including individual users, is invited to attend. Please consider redistributing through your own project or team channels to encourage attendance.
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Bryan
Stats Administrator
BOINC Developer

Nothing's really "broken", but there are always complaints that one project gives more or less credit than others, and someone's favorite project(s) aren't on the approved "Credit Whore Projects List" and they think it's unfair that their project(s) grant less credit than others.

It's a problem that can't really be solved, when you factor in projects like Rosetta and Cosmology grant credits using their own methods outside of BOINC, and seti offers optimized clients, and yet others have 64 bit clients.  Some projects have quorems that "average" granted credits in some fashion, and others are non quorem.  Let's not even get into the older BOINC clients which claim credit based on different methods than the new ones.

I wish them luck, though I might just stop by to take a peak at the mess that such a discussion is almost guaranteed to become .

Heh, every credit system that was built into boinc was simple and based on work completed over time.  First, it was benchmark based credit system that was based on something like 32 cobblestones granted for a reference wu on a reference machine.  Well, that didn't work well as people manipulated their benchmarks with either optimized boinc clients or by altering values in their xml files.  Now it's based on the gigaflop counter, and that doesn't really work as some science apps are less fp intensive than others, and yet other projects don't even use boinc's system.  Oh yeah, and you have older versions of the benchmark based boinc running along with the gflop based boinc and both can claim wildly different amounts of credits.

There's nothing simple about it, because there is no one size fits all.   Each project is different and does what it needs for the project, scoring systems are secondary.  It's like saying that baseball, football, basketball, hockey, lacross, and forumula 1 racing should come up with an equitable scoring system that fits them all so we can compare the performance of a team or athlete objectively between one sport and another. 

Can't be done now, will never be done, waste of time trying .

Rac and credit both, when comparing 2 projects directly, have less meaning than the do within a project. However, the more projects a team or individual does, and the more evenly they're spread out, they can have more meaning across total boinc.  For example, if you crunch a low granting project and a high granting project, the overall boinc rac and credits average out to some extent.  So averaging an individual who crunches multiple projects across all of boinc (or team for that matter) makes the "competition" and stats to some extent balance out.

Before rosetta started to cause me problems,  I had most of my fleet there.  Sure, I was getting less credit than someone running seti or qmc, but so what?  I crunch rosetta because I liked the project goals, and it was well run, stable, and had excellent communication with the volunteer community.  When most of that stopped, I swiched some of my resources to QMC because I like the idea of working on quantum chemistry stuff, some over to WCG for the cancer related projects, and my 64 bit boxes to ABC until more projects start coming up with 64 bit clients.  I'm getting (factoring out upgrades), about 70% more rac on those projects then when I was doing rosetta, but if the rosetta project hadn't degraded itself, I'd still be there.

Remember, it's all in fun.  IMO, the playing field is level enough, but don't lose sight of the fact that hopefully we're helping science and research first and being credit whores second .