They're not compatible with stratum protocol, so have pretty much been dropped, as hardly anyone still uses getwork.

K.

That's one thing I never quite understood: the rapid migration to stratum. I understand that with increasing hashrates and the desire to reduce network traffic, clearly the 'diff 1' getwork protocol was unsuitable. But using the more mature getwork (LP) with vardiff has, in my experience to date, been more stable (in terms of cgminer/bfgminer crashes) than using stratum. Just today I've had 2 mining software crashes running stratum, while 2 other instances on getwork/vardiff are still running without issue. I like the reduced stales on stratum, but if I have to continually monitor and restart my mining software when it crashes I'm losing more shares than any benefit the reduced stales can have.

Regarding NMC on slush: only the getwork clients are merge-mining NMC (current that's only a few % of the total pool); stratum clients (the vast majority) are not. But NMC rewards are distributed to everyone with an NMC wallet defined. This is why the NMC payout are so small.

Then how do Bitminter and Bitparking do it? Both mine NMC (and some others in Bitparkings' case) on stratum.

Both of those blocks have now been fully confirmed and the Shares/Reward has still remained unchanged.

I get the rare/occasional NMC reward does that mean I failed over to getwork for that block?

As stated before in this thread, NMC is only worked on from the getwork miners, but the reward is divided among those who have provided NMC address

Same here - half for 17749 and my hashrate also dropped in half

It seems one of the backends is still causing problems as another worker in the same network is OK i.e. not a connection problem

All backends seems fine, I'm not aware of any problem. Also most block rewards are fine, so there's no indicator anything is wrong with the pool. I wouldn't be surprised it is yet another routing problem on the internet, as I saw many times in few last weeks :-/.

Although I have an office near the explosion place, I'm fine!

My bad, I was entering wrong email address. Now with the correct one, password changed.

I wouldn't say it's normal.  But I wouldn't say it's abnormal either.

I happens every once in a while.  Hopefully less and less as btc becomes more popular...