Modesti, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are supposed to contact the admin and ask them if they agree with a sprint, no?
This should provide visibility to the project admin and help him to reduce the stress on his server.
Icecold, at the same time, the project admin can put a limit of the numbers of units a user can stock. This will avoid the issue of bunkers. (But not the surge of users)
In one hand, organizing sprint is not always easy and high participation is very positive for the community (Teams involved etc..) and normally the project as well, but in the other hand I know we had some "Crash tour" in some cases, where the server could not handle the load...we usually take it positively as it still provide a boost in the progression of the project, yet it can also impact the project more seriously.
One way could be indeed to change some of the rules of the Formula BOINC and others competitions such as:
- Always ask admin approval
- Remove the projects that are known weaker (based on their hardware I suppose, or simply through the admin approval)
On the vote, it's not really an issue, if the list of projects to vote can all handle the load.
Another way, that I prefer, is to further support the project admin by implementing some temporary load balancer (Additional servers to handle the load, download/upload or else). But this become a technical discussion with the BOINC Server platform. I've raised this suggestion in May this year on BOINC forum, but probably few people are interested only.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=13692#98398Keep the crunch up