I was going to say: The GSoC-students seem to have similar problems finding all the information they need. (There is a "Google Summer of Code" link under the "Community" menu on the Boost-website but from there I did not find the current GSoC project-page of Boost. A Google-search found it instead.)
Actually no, what you're seeing there is students who don't feel like reading the instructions and ask here if they really need to do work as the instructions say because they don't want to do the competency test, or read an instructions page longer than a few paragraphs. You may not be aware, but as part of our GSoC application will fill in an extensive list of links and documentation, and Google hand checks those for suitability before we are approved as an org. Any GSoC student cannot fail to be told what they need to do. Furthermore, I've cultivated extensively the SEO ranking of the GSoC information for Boost over the years, and each year I verify it ranks at the top of the search results for "google summer of code C++" and variations thereof. GSoC at Boost is one of the most competitive GSoCs around with an oversubscription ratio of at least 7:1 which suggests students are finding us easily. We set an extremely high bar, indeed so high it worries us that we are being exclusionary and Google since the recent admin changes is not massively happy with it either. However since I introduced the changes which raised that bar we've had much more successful summers, in the past about half the student projects were disappointing because the student just wasn't up to the coding ability needed. In the last few GSoCs we've had more problems with student work ethic than coding ability, which is a nice problem to have. Nevertheless it's a fine line to tread, and whoever takes over from me after my time as admin finishes will take a different balance. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/