Good day, all.

I've upgraded to 8.2.8 on MacOS 15.7.2 recently.

What I am seeing is that the boinc_master and boinc_project groups how show up as "accounts" on the login screen as well as on the menu bar. I've tried un-installing (which will make the groups properly disappear) and re-installing. This occurs regardless of whether or not I choose, at install time, to allow non admin users to control BOINC.

We've been running BOINC for well over a decade now and this is new behavior which appeared with 8.2.8.

Any thoughts?

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Yes, I have noticed as well that the pseudo-users (not groups) boinc_master and boinc_project . There is nothing we can do about it. It is apparently due to a change in MacOS by Apple. Fortunately, it does no harm. I'm not aware of it causing any a problems. I recommend just ignoring it. BOINC has always created those: For more information, see https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/SandboxUser.

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

Thanks for getting back to me, Charlie!

Tracking the note you provided the link to. The strange thing is that this just started with 8.2.8 and I’m not even running the latest MacOS release.

Any rate, if you figure out how to code it out at some point, that would be great, but, as you note, it does no harm…

Best regards,

Do these accounts directly use the shell? They show up with it in their directory information:

$ dscl . -read /Users/boinc_master UserShell
UserShell: /bin/zsh

$ dscl . -read /Users/boinc_project UserShell
UserShell: /bin/zsh

I’m wondering what would happen if I changed that to /usr/bin/false, like the other “no show” accounts like root and daemon.

— Andy

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Working solution on my iMac :

sudo dscl . -create /Users/boinc_master IsHidden 1
sudo dscl . -create /Users/boinc_project IsHidden 1

+ reboot

Boinc keeps working fine, boinc users are not visible anymore from login page.

This is fixed, and will be available with the next release.

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BOINC maintainer.
For any insight, check my BOINC Development Blog.

Great to know - thanks to all the volunteers who maintain and improve!

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+1 :)

But so it is will be in the next release, when released.

What I propose above is the same thing done in the fix, and you can do it now in the terminal.

In reply to JeromeC's message of 21 Jan 2026:

+1 :)

But so it is will be in the next release, when released.

What I propose above is the same thing done in the fix, and you can do it now in the terminal.

Just to be clear, I'm not against this manual solution.
I just wanted to let you know that we aware of it, has it fixed, and will release it as soon as we are ready for the release.
For those who care, they can do these manual actions, while other can just wait for the next release.

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BOINC maintainer.
For any insight, check my BOINC Development Blog.

Yes this is exactly what I meant also :) +1