I am beginning to sympathise with the views about the value of mining some sh*tcoins; after the most recent hourly update I was left with these residues:

• ANC 0.00001867
• EAC 3.13559797
• LOT 181.78628152

having the combined estimated value of 11 satoshi, all of which actually seems to be vested in EAC.

I wonder whether the effort of mining these is really worthwhile.  Thank goodness for LTC and DOGE which still seem to bring home the bacon despite fluctuating conversion rates.

If you calculate the number of your shares as a percentage of the total for each round, you will see that it is nearly double for 22219 compared to the two following rounds.  That suggests to me that something somewhere borked, maybe more than once.  It's possible that it happened very close to the end of 22219, recovered and failed again during 22220, and finally recovered partway through 22221;  that pattern could account for no reward in 22220, and the reward in 22221 being higher than 22219 despite having a smaller percentage of shares.

My own stats also show a big drop in shares credited during 22220, although my reward fell to about 1/3 normal which is at least better than zero; my rewards for 22219 and 22221 look okay.

At the time of writing my hash rate for both Slush and BTCguild is running at about half of what it should be, even allowing for the busy time of day (evening in the UK), but Scryptguild is chugging away happily using the GPU on the same PC.  Knowing my luck, we'll have a run of success while my hash rate is bumping along the floor.

My pleasure.  Do you sometimes feel that earning your fee is hard work? 

In a little more detail:  five GLC blocks were found in shift 2907.  These consequently showed up as blocks paid in 2906, 2905, 2904, and 2903.  You will  observe that no GLC shares at all were reported until shift 2906.  Two further blocks were found in 2908, so that the blocks paid number for 2904-2907 increased from five to seven.

Referring to the figures you originally quoted, and ignoring the two blocks found subsequently:
In shift 2906, you contributed 80064 of the 80080 shares; in shift 2907 you contributed all 90176; that's a total of 170,256.  At that point there were five GLC blocks earning 250 coins.  Your share of these was 170,240/170,256 or 249.97650597 (rounded).  After deduction of the pool fee, you were left with the 244.97697565 you mention.

Why do I get the feeling that you don't really understand how PPLNS mining works?

I just noticed a transitory display error after I made a manual withdrawal:  on confirming the withdrawal and returning to the dashboard screen, the account balance was the same as the withdrawals figure plus 1 Satoshi, and Earnings was the total of both.  Got me all excited for a moment, but on refreshing the screen it had corrected itself; Earnings=Withdrawals with Account balance zero.

Well done!  And no. it's not a dud, it just means that there happened to be no transactions attached to it, and thus no transaction fees.  Not sure why, there would normally be some in 17 minutes.  So the pool just gets the straight BTC25, less Slush's 2% commission.  The following blocks look fine, so unless something really disastrous happens, like a major fork (highly unlikely), we share the payout.  Thank'ee kindly!

Or D) Set payment threshold too high.

That must be one of the longest blocks in recent times - 302879 (following our 302878) took 1 hour 10 minutes to solve.  It was accumulating a nice fat bonus of transaction fees;  a shame it was Discus Fish that found it and not us.

If you "didn't make anything" then you won't have any payment to come, will you?  But as you seem to think you should have a payment then you must have made something.  Consequently, and in the absence of specific figures to support what you say, I am inclined to disregard your whining.

A little more information might help elicit a meaningful response.

It's more likely to be either your router or firewall.  I used to work in online banking technical support and this was a common issue: customers could access anything except our bank's web site.  It most commonly affected people using one particular ISP.  The cure was almost always to cold boot the router (disconnect the power, wait 30 seconds, reconnect).  In rare cases a factory reset of the router would do the trick.  One tried changing the security from WPA to WEP and that worked, although I wouldn't really recommend it as a fix!  If you have a co-operative neighbour, you might try connecting through his broadband, and you will very likely succeed.

If it's a firewall issue, try reducing the security level temporarily.

Which miner are you using?  What is your command line?  Are you sure that has not changed (perhaps by inadvertently using an old batch file?)

I lost a couple of hours' processing the other night (and, in compliance with Sod's Law, my entire share of round 22126) when the Firefox memory leak froze my pc.  I had closed the window some days earlier but forgot to kill the process. 

I find that the internet connection (or possibly the router) sometimes slows down the hash rate with Slush: recently, after some days of erratic hash rates and earnings, restarting the router increased my hash rate by 50% immediately and my earnings stabilised - although, oddly, the hash rate with BTCguild was unaffected, remaining at its normal level before and after (the work is shared 2:1).

Ah - you haven't read much on these forums, have you? 

I don't really see much problem with letting the system do everything: it already endeavours to maintain the highest profitability by swapping the currently mined coin at intervals which may be just a few seconds; nobody is going to keep up with that manually.  No system will ever be perfect, but as long as it keeps turning in satisfactory earnings I am content to let the machine take the strain while I get on with my life.

I see the pool's hash rate is already creeping higher than it has been for some time - possibly the good news is already spreading?

The information is in the PPLNS stats window, left-hand column.  Just hover over the buttons to see how many blocks were found, and which kind.

But DOGE is falling against BTC.

That came from the heart!

LTC has not auto-converted for some hours, and now DOGE appears to be stuck as well.

[Edit] DOGE is now OK, but LTC is still not converting.

If you read back the past few pages, you will see that eleuthria announced that Scryptguild will be closing soon, with the scrypt mining functions transferred to BTCguild and restricted to LTC and DOGE.  I doubt that he is going to add new coins at this late stage.

I know the reported hash rate is an estimate, but that isn't the issue for me.  The number of shares per worker being shown is an issue, however, and I don't see why the number should go down as well as up.  Unless perhaps it is now showing the number of shares which are still earning and have not yet timed out, rather than the number of shares credited since the round started.  I never mentioned anything about knowing how much BTC per GH/s I am making, and I'm not interested in that.  I am however interested in knowing why my earnings per round are sometimes a quarter or less than in adjacent rounds, even though my shares are a broadly similar percentage of the total (meaning that there was probably no communication breakdown near the end of the round).  This used to occur from time to time and was usually corrected before the round was confirmed, but that doesn't seem to happen now.

I have, by the way, been mining in this pool since early last year.