Rav3n's fork brings p2pool support for a bunch of alt coins.  The original project written by forrestv has only support for BTC and LTC.  Also, Rav3n's fork has a different front end.

EDIT: looks like windpath pushed the post button right before I did

Left to its own devices a node will adjust the share time to 30 minutes.  Therefore if the node's total hash rate would find a share in under half an hour the node will adjust the share difficulty up so that it settles back to that 30 minute mark.

You override that by using the "/".  As long as you use any value that is less than the network minimum share difficulty your worker will submit the minimum share difficulty.  So... Using /1000 or /1 or /1000000 doesn't matter.

And..... another week gone by with p2pool only finding a single block.  Ouch!  My S3 on the standard p2pool payout was a bit lucky and found more shares than it should have, so at least there was a small bit of consolation.

2/13 - 2/20
NastyPoP - 0.00698833BTC
NastyP2P - 0.01822003BTC
Expected - 0.0348BTC

No.

You can only lower your share difficulty to the network's determined difficulty.  You do this by using the "/" after your address.  This may sound confusing, but it's pretty easy in reality.

If the node you're mining on has a considerably higher hash rate than what you are contributing, then it is advantageous to you to tell the node you want to have the network minimum share value.  For example.  Let's say that I run my own node and I have 30TH/s on it.  If you bring a single S5 onto my node, then you should setup your user name like this: "MYBTCADDRESS/1000".  That "/1000" will ensure that the node will accept the minimum share difficulty for your miner - which right now is 3,200,000ish.  My 30TH/s miner, if I set the user name up like this: "MYBTCADDRESS", will assign me a share difficulty of about 14,000,000.

P2Pool assigns your miners difficulty based upon the node's total hash rate.  You override that value by using "/".

Hope that helps.

Hope you hit it... for the first time in over a year I've got some of my rigs mining somewhere other than p2pool.  Yes, I've still got 35TH/s of rented gear and a few of my own miners on p2pool, but 6 of my S3s are here.  Another crap luck block of p2pool... but at least I made most of my last rental's cost back on the block.  Doesn't it just figure... I've done really well on p2pool this past year... and the one time I decide to rent a ton of hash... p2pool has the worst luck streak in the history of the pool.

So buzzed that you're posting on your wife's account?

Glad the rentals worked out for you.  I burned 15BTC last week pushing 200-400TH onto p2pool... Made 2.5 of it back.  Oh well... Crap luck killed me.

You know how they say that if you get enough monkeys and give them all keyboards they'll eventually reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare?  Well, I thought I'd put that to the test...

So I imported a bunch of monkeys.  Had to pay off a few customs guys to look the other way.  Gave them all keyboards and let them have at it.  While they didn't produce any Shakespeare, they did manage to come up with a valid solution for the block.  Unfortunately for me, they want to keep it to themselves and every time I try to get it I'm bombarded with flying poo.  Ungrateful little simians...

LOL... my best share since the restart of my rPi back in December with the 5 U2s attached to it running cgminer is 9.1M.  Pretty sure no amount of lucky block dancing is gonna help me out there ... gonna have to figure out what to sacrifice next to the block gods... apparently they're not too happy with the goats so far.

Very likely we'll see the S6 come out this quarter based on the same BM1384 as the S5.  I guarantee Guy and Zvi are not sitting on their laurels, but are hard at work developing the successor to the SP20/30 line.  I don't think they're going to jump on the 20nm/16nm/14nm process yet, but will continue to optimize their 28nm chips.  KNC... they've already done the 20nm... maybe they're working on optimizing it.  It's industrial mining only for those guys, though.  AM and Friedcat are likely to push something out the door as well, but I'd be more inclined to go with Q2 there.

Oh well... those are my speculations

Yeah... fire000 attracted my attention on the p2pool thread.  He came on there claiming p2pool was broken and the payouts were somehow flawed.  It was quite a few pages of back and forth between us.  Naturally I felt compelled to counter his absurdity with actual verifiable evidence to the contrary.

I remember the original BAN thread and had posted in it as well.  I remember thinking to myself, "why is this s0br guy standing by and doing nothing while these idiots continue to behave the way they do... it's going to make him and his pool look bad very soon."

Honestly, a part of me feels for the guy... every time he makes an appearance he's attacked.  Of course, if he had been present all along, had not let verifiable idiots speak for him and his pool, and had truly been transparent about his business model it's very likely none of this vitriol against him ever would have happened.  Of course as time has gone on, more and more people join in with the lynch mob carrying their pitchforks and screaming for him to be burned at the stake.

Hey... while waiting for p2pool to do it, I managed to solve the block by hand using an abacus and a slide rule... how do I submit it to the blockchain and collect my 25BTC?

Why not?  Maybe you missed out on the context of Eleuthria's response.  At the time of this quote, I was calling fire000 out on his BS claims.  He was spreading lies and misinformation around the board.  His arguments were terrible, his ability to construct well thought out posts was nonexistent, and his spelling was just terrible.  I was asking for any BAN miners to share their information as I had, so we could have a good point of reference.  Eleuthria basically said I had a better chance of stepping in fresh dinosaur shit than of my request being fulfilled.  He also pointed out that the pool model as it was could not possibly sustain itself and that sooner or later the miners would bear the brunt of it.

None of what he wrote in his reply was irrelevant at the time, so I'm confused as to why your view of him has changed.

I'll take the virgin... you guys go ahead with the burning

I remember that discussion well, since I was directly involved in it .  The context of it was that I was looking for actual BAN miners to come forth with their payouts to provide evidence to the claims of 110% expectations.  I provided evidence of my own miners clearly showing that p2pool had paid more than the 110% claimed by BAN, and that p2pool had quite effectively walloped BAN during the supposed test period.  I pointed out that p2pool was left out of the testing, so I provided the numbers.  Of course, that brought out the more vocal idiots who did everything they could to spew enough bullshit to try and bury my evidence.  In his response, Eleuthria states the obvious - which has been stated numerous times throughout this thread - that a PPS pool cannot survive on its own merit.  He is also very openly calling out the vocal idiots on their inability to post any kind of logical arguments.

You know the old saying... you've got to spend money to make money.

Ok... I think we've waited long enough.  Somebody please go uncomment the block finding code so we can get back to business 

I purposefully didn't include the prior months of 10% bonuses or past wallet compromises.  Obviously those factors mean even more coins from the pool operator's pockets .  As for the other business, perhaps that other venture is providing the income to sustain the pool.  It's a tough call to make as a business owner.  Do I continue to maintain a part of my business that is guaranteed to hemorrhage money?  Well, does that business unit attract enough attention to my other ventures to make up for that negative cash flow?

Definitely some interesting speculation there.  The author needs to hire an editor, though

Any PPS pool's sustainability depends on the depth of the pool operator's pockets.  Statistically, the payout method is doomed to failure simply because of luck and orphans.  No pool can guarantee 100% or greater luck, and as a result, the bad times must be paid for out of pocket.  This is why most every PPS pool charges high fees to miners - to help offset that out-of-pocket cost to the pool operator.  At 0% fees, and a promised 1% bonus, s0br has taken on every bit of risk by himself.

Think on this for a second.  A single bad luck round of 800% means that the pool must have 175BTC as a buffer in order to ensure miners are paid.  Since this pool would pay 101%, that's 177BTC buffer for that bad luck round.  In other words, unless this pool remains averaging better than 101% luck, s0br's paying out of pocket.  Of course, s0br may very well be merge-mining a bunch of SHA-256 coins to help offset this... as well as using any ad revenues from the site, but when push comes to shove, the end result is that the BTC mining operation cannot sustain itself.

So, the question you must ask yourself is this, "Do I trust s0br to keep shoveling coins into the pool to ensure I get paid?"

yeah... I've just got to laugh about it.  No sense in crying over spilled milk as they say.  Really sucks to see the balance in my wallet now, though