I don't know if this was answered somewhere else but searching for the keyword credits didn't pull anything up. on the screen saver there is a screen that says something like "Your credits: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Avg. Credits: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ " was just kind of wondering what that was all about.

Thank you for your time.

My understanding is that volunteer computing efforts like this don't involve the exchange of money, but many users enjoy tracking how much computing effort they contribute to projects. Projects award acknowledgement credit for a unit of computing effort in BOINC called a Cobblestone. Here is a description of the credit calculation: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Computation_credit

Projects award Cobblestone credits to individuals and teams. Here is an example with individual and team leaderboards: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/stats.php

However, Science United is a work manager and it aggregates the work contributed by individuals. Therefore Science United has an account at each project, not the individual person. For example, on the above Rosetta leaderboard, "Science United" shows up as a top 10 individual participant. I don't see a separate user account at Rosetta or any of the other projects.

So to see personal contributions, there are a few options:
- Computing effort is automatically tracked in BOINC. Switch to the Advanced View, then the Statistics tab. There is a chart of activity and I believe that the unlabeled vertical axis on the chart represents Cobblestones.
- Science United website: on my user home page (clicking on my user name in the top right)
---Contribution section, multiple options
---Settings section: email>edit>status emails. These say: "Greetings from Science United. In the last day your computers have contributed X hours of processing time, and have completed X jobs. Congratulations!"

Thank you. Badges are a bit silly. No one gets into offering free computer service for a pat on the back...but it is still cool to have a sort of acknowledgement to oneself even if no one else knows, right?! Indeed. I have years of World Community Grid stats and badges. And badges for other attached projects (SETI which no longer crunches), Search for Prime Numbers, Large Hadron Collider etc.) Yet, it's still fun to just have a "look-see" and smile as the years and badges go by and collect!