My idle worker notifications are not working at all. My miner is still getting knocked offline at random by "new block detected" messages (no clue what's causing this), but I'm no longer receiving notifications when it goes offline.
What are you mining with? If your seeing "new block detected" a lot this means your shares are below 128 right now. So if your cpu mining it will take a while to get a share. However, your shares are worth a lot more.. it evens out.. lowers bandwith. Basically you get paid twice as much a share then 64.. and 4 times the amount for 32.. This is what VARDIFF is all about.
We originally went back to 64 diff but noticed a huge overhead on the database entries. We decided to go back to 128.
The main goal is allow for people to set their own difficulty per each minor. But this is going to be a bit of code change and working with someone back the backend stratum.