3 blocks out of 189 = 1.58%.  However, it's a pretty small sample size to make any calls.

It was going to be in last night, but the server became available and I moved the pool over.  Since then I've been celebrating mostly as the pool is working, going strong, and growing fast again.  The alerts will likely be available late tonight/early tomorrow.

At least as of right now, no sign of a DDoS hitting BTC Guild.  The host we moved to last night has very beefy DDoS protection in place.

Difficulty has gone up significantly in 3 weeks.  Unless your hash rate has increased in line with difficulty, your rewards will always diminish, regardless of which pool you use.

Not a pool feature specifically, but Nicksasa of our IRC chatroom (#btcguild on freenode) has a bot which has been used for pool stats and block announcements.  He recently added a betting system where people can bet 0.1 BTC for how many shares our next round will take, winner take all minus 0.01 off the top (transaction fee to send winnings) and a 5% fee from each bet (0.005).

EDIT:  Corrected transaction fee taken off the top (0.01, not 0.1!)

By now it should be assumed that if a hardware change (or in this case location & complete server change) occurs, it will die once I think it's safe to go to sleep.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but I can't stay awake for 48 hours to monitor the server before getting some rest.

Server is back up, fixed a few things that weren't setup the same as the old server, and fixed some DB settings to account for the dramatic increase in RAM available on the new server.

2, definitely 2.

BTC Guild is back online and running strong so far.  New server is MUCH faster than the old one based on reports from all our users in the IRC channel.  We're now more connected to other bitcoin nodes meaning our blocks will spread across the network faster, and new blocks will be notified faster via long poll updates.

Registrations are back up, and we encourage our users that switched to other pools to come back now that we aren't running on an overloaded server.

New server is being setup for the pool RIGHT NOW.  It will be coming online in the next few hours, and registration will be back open.

No idea what the problem is on that one.  We've still got about a thousand workers running which aren't experiencing anything close to it.

Please read the giant warning on the front post, or the last few pages of the thread.  The server is absolutely overloaded.  Even after shutting registration, the people already in the pool have been adding speed/turning workers back on and pushed it 30 GH past what it was when new users were stopped from registering.

Sorry, it's just I've seen the same post within minutes of every difficulty jump for the past 2 months, and I'm getting crabby while waiting for my dedicated server to become available .

For the hundredth time:  The websites showing network hash rate are based off the time to solve the last X blocks.  The estimate network hash rate is always screwy after a difficulty change.  Wait 24 hours before your head explodes.

Same goes for the next difficulty estimate.

For the hundredth time:  The websites showing network hash rate are based off the time to solve the last X blocks.  The estimate network hash rate is always screwy after a difficulty change.  Wait 24 hours before your head explodes.

As has been posted for the last few days, the server needs to be relocated to a dedicated host, which is lined up but not yet ready.

The amount on the site is NEVER the same as your miner, it's a 15 minute average.  Right now it will likely be less due to occasional miner idles that are being caused by the current volume of workers on the server.  This is the reason new registrations were closed, the current server cannot handle the load (we grew over 100 GH/sec in 4 days).

Good luck with that if they ever catch on.  Just because you haven't been audited yet means nothing.  When you do get audited, enjoy the interest and penalties.  There are thousands of people out they operating under the:  "I haven't been taken to tax court yet, so I must not be doing anything wrong" theory.  Ignorance won't get you off the hook.  Make sure you hire a CPA experienced in audits, they'll save you a lot of money when the time comes.

Not sure if you're the person that requested it in the IRC chat, but JSONP is on the list of features to add in the near future.

Well, if the IRS audited you, you're in trouble for not reporting the income.  They don't care what Bitcoins are, they care about the deposits that hit your bank account for actual $.

For Mining (Schedule C):  You can expense your electricity usage (not all, only the amount you can prove was used for BTC), depreciate your machines (% based if its also a personal use machine), and then report the full amount you sold the BTC for.

For trading (Schedule D):  Records of the amounts paid and when for BTC, and records of the amounts you sold them for and when.  Short/long-term gains.  Use FIFO or LIFO consistently for allocating your sales against the different purchases, since the IRS will not have somebody with the knowledge to understand how the coins could be potentially traced back to their actual purchase.

No spare servers are up yet, trying to push the server to a dedicated host first.  After getting moved to a machine that shouldn't have any issues scaling to 1 TH/sec+, I'll be working on modifying the pool software to shard it across multiple servers in different regions, with redirections when one fails.

The new server coming up should be able to support a a pool speed over 1 TH//sec before needing more software optimizations or separate servers.  My goal is to begin working on linking a separate EU server after the new one is online and I get the features I want implemented.  That way we'll have two servers in different regions for people to pick from, but a single linked website for stats/rewards.