Hi,

I was linking my old Seti account to my new account - somehow I must have been logged into some other account because now it is not linked.

Any chance that I can get that account back? As it was the main one I did the most with SETI with. The other classic account is fine but rather my original.

Thanks,

Hi all.

I have similar problem but mine is a bit different. Please help me.

I used to be a member of the project for years back in early 2000s. Since I have changed my PCs a few times, eventually I lost my memory about my account and discontinued the project. I also lost my registered email account access, since I left the school, whose email address I used for the project.

Before I started this new account, I tried to recover my old account password and put my old school email address. The password recovery email from SETI must have sent to the account, but the next time I put the address (since I totally lost the email account access, I have no way to check it), SETI says there is no information on the email address.

I really do not want to lose my old effort here. Is there ANY way to recover my old work to combine with this account?

I just have information on the old email account without any access nor password. The old school email address has unique name of my real one (surely only one in the world) and I can show you that is mine by presenting my passport or something to SETI.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It is not possible to merge two "BOINC based" accounts. This the result of a decision made years ago which was the result of a number of people gaining "fraudulent" access to other peoples accounts.

---

Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Wasn't there a way to change your email address if you knew the old one? A lot of sites use "password hint" nowadays. Not everyone knows a password used 10 years ago. Not even I, maybe one ought to have that option programmed into this site?

Maybe one should revive that? Since, how would a "fradurant" user know someone's OLD email address used to login to "such" account. Why someone would want to fraudulently hack into an old seti account with worthless OLD credit would be beyond me to begin with. What could be gained by hacking into an account that has been inactive?

Since, how would a "fradurant" user know someone's OLD email address used to login to "such" account.

People frequently post their email addresses on these forums when asking for assistance. Some people haven't changed their emails in 10-15 years. I, personally, still have access to my AOL email account from 1997.

Since people are so willing to give out their email, it isn't very hard to use it to claim accounts. Further, it isn't very hard to try several variations of an email account using different hosting platforms to guess what their old email might have been.

Why someone would want to fraudulently hack into an old seti account with worthless OLD credit would be beyond me to begin with. What could be gained by hacking into an account that has been inactive?

No ethics and a bad spirit of competition. Back in the early days of SETI, pre-BOINC, people had found a way to repeatedly return the same completed workunit to inflate their score, even though the score is meaningless and hold no real world value.

When SETI joined BOINC (or rather, was the main motivation for BOINC and to allow other scientists access to a tremendous amount of computing power), rampant cheating in the form of claiming as many old SETI accounts as possible was done. Their only gain was bragging rights, yet the spirit of competition and a lack of ethics in not doing something they shouldn't be doing (and not caring unless they got caught) meant they would continue doing so.

Mind you - no one was "hacking" into an account. All they needed was the email address and if it was valid they could claim the past credits as their own.