After my first 6 months of mining, I have come up with a few pearls of wisdom for beginners:

90% of all mining program errors are due to too much overclock/undervolt
The other 10% are caused by errors in configuration
If you’re sure the problem is not the riser, the problem is the riser
Never keep any wallets on a machine you use for mining
It’s hard to mine the most profitable coin because it’s always changing
If you have to sell your mined coins immediately to pay the electric bill, you probably don’t need to be mining (have some working capital)
The pool with the highest hash rate doesn’t make you the most coins over time
Always keep older versions of mining programs, you might need them one day
When a new GPU driver comes out, let somebody else be the guinea pig
Time is money in mining.  If your machine is down, you’re not making money
Fine tuning a rig can be time consuming; don’t let it consume all your time
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Please feel free to add your own...

Most of the scam mining programs being posted are from hijacked accounts.

Here’s how to spot a potentially hijacked account:
Go to the members profile and click on last post.  If the member recently started posting again after not posting for several years, odds are the account was hijacked.

You can also check the members who ask questions or give OP props the same way as there are usually 2-3 hijacked accounts in this type of thread.

I’ve noticed several pools offer a static difficulty option.  Is there an advantage to using a static difficulty?

I started mining Alt coins this past February (I know... not the best time to start), and have amassed small positions in 15 different coins.  I decided I’d like to consolidate my holdings into Eth or BTC so didn’t have so many coins to keep up with.  I was doing some research last night as to which exchange to use and found I’d have to sign up for at least 4 and possibly 5 different exchanges to consolidate the way I want to.  I own coins from Ethash, Equihash, and Cryptonight algos.

So, why isn’t there one exchange where I could swap all my Alt coins to Eth/BTC?  Kind of like the US stock market where there is the NYSE and NASDAQ.