You can mention other pools.  It's not like it's hidden data.  I assume you're talking about 50BTC.  Well I was mining on there yesterday and thanks to the downtown I lost about 3 hours of revenue.  The OP claims the shares were counted but on a pure PPS system it's very easy to see that my earnings are exactly 7/8th of what was expected yesterday, so 3 hour downtime.  Which happens to coincide with the 3 hours missing on the graphs.

This wouldn't be a big deal if the pool OP shut down the pool or redirected traffic.  Any sensible miner not new to the game would have backups.  The problem occurs when they OP says there's nothing to worry about and basically miners are spinning their wheels.  I even found a block for them yesterday.  But since CGMiner didn't detect a disconnect it didn't switch over to backups.

And this is where you can tell the good pools from the bad.  BTCGuild has proven itself time and time again.  Sure it gets hit with DDoS but E is very much on top of it.  That is probably the most stable pool.  So what does it matter if you pay a 5% higher fee if the pool allows 5% more income due to more reliability.

As this thread is about Bitminter we all know Dr. H is very much on top of his creation.  I'm sure for most pool ops it has become a full time job.  I used to mine here and will happily switch back - the only thing holding me off is the lack of miner offline notification.  It's pretty much summer here in Southern California and some of my older cards are not tolerant of this heat.  2 cards are already running 1/2 speed and goes Sick/Dead quite often - can't wait for ASIC.

So again choice of a pool is determined by the end user.  Those who can micromanage a 200 GPU farm as their daily job can afford to sit at a pool with no notifications.  I'll happily pay a higher fee for a pool that has better reliability as long as it doesn't concentrate the network.

so is the 1.50% perk + 1% pool fee worth it, to avoid the dry spell? just curious

yeah I just did the math, I think this more than alleviates the risk of bad luck, and I still get namecoins, compared to other pools

I've always donated to the site, 'cos it's a very easy to use site and full of info. And "when" my BFL 5GH/s and 25GH/s ASIC's come along I know it will work right out of the box 

Are you sure you counted "orphan" blocks? Remember, stale blocks do not count and even with the perk, you do not get BTC for stales. I believe actual orphan blocks are much, much less than 1.5%.

I'm working on stability issues right now. Haven't even had a chance to look at Litecoin at all yet. Can't make any promises.

Can I ask is it bad to have a miner as powerful as realasicminer in the pool ?

It's good, actually.

The higher the pool's hashrate, the lower the miners' daily variance. The expected rewards remain the same, but the actual rewards fluctuate less.

Now, a single fast miner will mine at a high worker difficulty, which means boosting the pool's hashrate without putting a strain on the pool's network and CPU usage.

I will try a simple analogy:
If you have 500 coins worth $0.10 in your wallet, you have $50.
If you have one $50 note in your wallet, you have $50 as well.

Now if you go to a shop, and try to pay a $50 item with 500 $0.10 coins, the cashier may look at you in a weird way and you will get many haters if there is a queue behind you. That does not happen with the $50 note.

This is because altough theoretically with the same value, in practice, dealing with 500 small coins for a $50 payment bears a much higher side-cost (read money handling) than a $50 note. The same applies to Bitcoins, and it translates as much higher transaction fees.

that would mean btc is following fiat style methods, thats disappointing but i follow.
thanks