Project notices

Version 6.12+ of the BOINC client software adds a mechanism called notices for conveying information to volunteers.

Notices are displayed as HTML in the Manager's Notices tab. When there is a new notice, the volunteer is alerted via a balloon or a bouncing BOINC icon.

Notices are intended to be used for events that either require volunteer action, or are likely to be of interest to the volunteer.

Projects are strongly encouraged to use notices to communicate with their volunteers. For example, a new scientific accomplishment or publication could be communicated as a notice. This will be seen even by volunteers who never visit the project web site.

To use this mechanism, put the following in your gui_urls.xml file:

<rss_feeds>
    <rss_feed>
        <url>PROJECT_URL/notices.php?userid=<userid/>&amp;auth=<rss_auth/></url>
        <poll_interval>86400</poll_interval>
    </rss_feed>
</rss_feeds>

This will cause the following items to be delivered as notices:

• Your project's news items (threads on the News message board). Note: only those items for exported as notices (using the Export button) will be delivered.
• Private messages
• Friend requests
• Posts to subscribed threads

Notes:

• You'll need to upgrade your server software to at least [22543] to use this feature.
• Replace PROJECT_URL with your project's URL
• <poll_interval> specifies how often (in seconds) clients should poll for notices.
• If you use CGI, restart your web server after you modify gui_urls.xml.

Notices are delivered as RSS feeds. You can include additional RSS feeds in the list. The server software will replace <userid/> with the user's ID, and <rss_auth/> with an authenticator that can be used by server software to authenticate the user.