Difficulty Drop!!!!!

Come and get easy WDC coins won't you ?

We still need more miners!

WDC is at 125.47% profitability right now, come and join the fun!

So far the beta has been going really really well.  No issues to speak of and for WDC we are getting a very low orphan rate.  Out of 43 blocks found only 2 were orphans.  I've seen reports of much higher orphan rates from other pools.  There may be some advantage in being on a smaller pool in this regard.

So far we've paid our beta miners two bonuses and more are coming.

Right now I am working on adding proper dynamic lastNshares calculation instead of using an arbitrary value.  This will have the result of shortening the ramp up and ramp down times for PPLNS and keeping them consistent even through difficulty changes.  Thanks to some excellent help from Meni Rosenfeld I have the necessary formula worked out and I just need to add it to the payout logic.

Just for comparison, at the current difficulty it will result in the ramp up and ramp down times being reduced by roughly 28% from what they are now.

the formula we are going to be using is 2 x (Block Difficulty Share Difficulty).  Very few pools have this implemented correctly, most simply use an arbitrary value like us at the moment.  Not using a dynamic calculation means the results are pretty unpredictable.  It can take a very long time to reach your full payout if the value is too high or cause too much variance in payouts if the value is too low and the correct value needed changes depending on the Block Difficulty, which changes quite often as you know.

I plan to have this implemented this weekend.  We do still have plenty of server slots available, so if you are interested in helping us out go ahead and jump on the server!

That's part of the reason that I decided to implement this, and who can blame them for not understanding it ?  Most pools have a horribly broken PPLNS implementation, especially the ones based upon mmcFE because the default payout logic is also horribly flawed.  It's taken a tremendous amount of work (by many others as well as myself) to get it to the point where it is now but I  am getting very close to having a polished properly working base to build pools on, quickly and easily. 

In a related matter, I am planning on uploading the finished product to github or something like it so that others can use and continue to improve the source. 

Dynamic lastNshares calculation is live!  I'll be watching it closely for the next few days to make sure it's working properly.

Also updated the left sidebar and the api to display the current lastNshares value and improved the descriptions and labels a little bit.

Also fixed a bug in the api and the left sidebar regarding the current round shares value.

Sent our BETA miners another bonus!

I'm very pleased with the progress of the upgrades to the pool's front end.

Compared to a stock mmcFE install the main differences are :

Major Improvements to payout logic :
- No more missed Block Payouts (Silverwolf)
- No more overpaying some miners and underpaying others (Silverwolf)
- No more duplicated Block Payouts (Silverwolf)
- No more having two different and completely separate sets of code responsible for block payouts. (Silverwolf)
- Dynamic PPLNS lastNshares calculation 2 x (Block Diff Share Diff) so PPLNS works the way it's supposed to.  (Silverwolf)
- Fast ramp/up and ramp/down of payouts so you don't have to wait forever to reach your full payout (See above line).(Silverwolf)
- PPLNS Status display (100% Transparency on block payouts, you can see exactly where the coins go) (Silverwolf)
- PPLNS lastNshares display in User Dashboard so you can see how many shares are currently being used to calculate payouts. (Silverwolf)
- Accurate Per Block Payout Estimates (Payout estimates are now generated by the same exact code as the actual payouts so no more inaccurate estimates) (Silverwolf)

Other Fixes & Improvents :
- Major Performance improvements (Charger)
- All Settings moved to a configuration.php file instead of being scattered throughout the code (Charger Silverwolf)
- No more hardcoded values (Coin Name & Abbr, BlockValue, Confirmations Needed for payout, etc...) all of these have been moved to the configuration.php file. (Charger Silverwolf)
- Corrected Dashboard Paid vs Unpaid & Current round shares display. (Silverwolf)
- Improved Dashboard item descriptions so they make sense (where applicable). (Silverwolf)
- Corrected ZeroVariance Line in Block Stats Chart to display the correct information. (Silverwolf)
- Orphan blocks are now displayed in the block list.

There is more, but I can't recall the rest at the moment.

The issue with PPLNS data being 50 minutes behind has been fixed.  Also, the PPLNS Status display is now properly sorted.

The fix for the PPLNS delay caused an issue with the current round shares display.

This doesn't effect anything other than this display and I will fix it shortly.

edit : FIXED!