JWU42, I've sent you a PM explaining things.

For other people that may experience these symptoms:

Due to slowness of our payout bitcoind you were viewing incorrect feedback. Funds-reservation causes your balance to display 0 during processing, so there is currently a delay before your transaction show up in the overview.

All transactions were processed correctly.

MC

Hi everyone,

The backend is having some trouble keeping up with you guys, we need to do some cleanup. This will be done in the coming week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

MC

We've been phasing out donations, because there have only ever been a handful of people that donated anyway. If you're having trouble resetting your donation amount, Please PM me your desired donation percentage and I'll set it manually for you.

Thanks for your reports. We've been getting more reports of seemingly random blocking recently, so we've taken another look at the blocking mechanism. The increase in FPGA mining caused the pool to become stricter in enforcing blocks. An additional constraint has now been added, again making it less likely for well-behaved miners to be penalized like this. Don't hesitate to PM us if you still feel you're being blocked without misbehaving.

Happy hashing,
MC

Hi Petervii,

Thanks for your report. I've looked into it for you, and the transaction mentioned in your PM was successful. I've sent you the blockexplorer link to the transaction in a PM.

A little background: After submitting a transaction to the network, it needs to be verified through inclusion in the blockchain. While a new block is found every 10 minutes on average, some blocks take quite a bit longer. In this case, it took 50 minutes between your payment request and the time the next block was found by the Bitcoin network. That might be why you could not find a reference to the payment.

Hope this helps,
MC

The payment bitcoind has reinitialized, payments are back online.

Enjoy!

MC

INCIDENT REPORT
Hi all,

Earlier today ABCPool was unreachable for some time. Turns out we were receiving out-of-bounds health data for one of our smaller upstream sources. In combination with poor bound checking, that resulted in a health calculation getting into an infinite loop in the getwork server code, expending 100% CPU time doing essentially nothing. In layman's terms, the server got stuck. The source in question is removed from the rotation until we can improve health data as well as bounds checking for that data.

This internal change and the associated upcoming fixes are not expected to have any effect on ABCPool miners, except for the down time earlier today of course. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Reports above indicate that GPUMax was also down shortly. It might be a good idea if you have multiple fallback pools for times like these. I remember a time a couple of months back, a similar thing happened. At least three pools (not ABCPool) were down, somehow all at the same time, and some of them quite large.

Regards,
MC

Long polling connections are reset every minute for performance and compatibility reasons, you can ignore any messages about that.

Your problem seems to be something different however, because your miners aren't getting any work. What client and version are you using? If you want you can PM me a log file and I'll take a look at it.

Regards,
MC

You're welcome QuantumFoam. I can certainly understand where you're coming from, there's been a number of pools scamming people out of their earnings.

ABCPool was actually *really* hacked last year, and we made an agreement with those affected to compensate their losses. Therefore I'm proud to say that ever since we started the pool in august '11 we've always payed out any Bitcoins our miners earned.

Should we ever shut down ABCPool, everyone will be given ample opportunity to withdraw their balances. However, we're going as strong as ever and we plan to be around for a long time!

MC

ISSUE: Payments are down temporarily, it may take up to 24 hours before we get them back online.

It has to do with long polling; we ask each mining client to reconnect it's LP connection for performance and compatibility reasons. If your miner is otherwise hashing normally, don't worry about it.

Thanks for your suggestion Shykull! We'll  keep it in mind for our next round of site improvements.

Hi Joyyen & Gigavps,

Thanks for your comments, and for being two of ABCPool's largest miners!

We could change our system and pay out NMC also, but it wouldn't help you earn more. Why is that?

As you may have experienced at other pools the NMC income from merged mining is very low, usually around 1%. It's a lot of work for miners to exchange their NMC for BTC, and after exchanging you only get a few bitcoin cents.

When you're mining at ABCPool, you're actually already doing merged mining part of the time. That's why our fee is so low compared to other PPS pools. We could pay NMC also, but then we would have to raise the fee. We can offer 1.5% PPS precisely because of the 1% NMC we sometimes earn at other places. And thanks to our BTC-only payouts, you never have to go to an exchange to convert your NMC to BTC.

The low fee and corresponding ease of use may be among the reasons many people have decided to trust ABCPool with their hashpower since its inception in august 2011.

Happy Hashing!
MC

The pool was down for a few hours last night, sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

The note beside the autopayout checkbox and the explanation in the manual cash-out section explain the process fully and tersely. If you have any concrete suggestions for how we can better communicate the way autopay works at ABCPool, we'd be happy to consider them.
It's up to you whether to withdraw the remainder, or to wait until it is included in the next round of payouts. Additional manual payouts will of course cause additional fees, as is clearly indicated on the site.

To have your balance touch zero regularly, disable autopay and start doing manual cash-outs.

If it is important for you to keep your balance at zero, turning off your miners is quite effective.

Your blanket statement is false. It is also unnecessarily alarming: Keep in mind we're talking about a potential, one time fee of BTC 0.01 here.

What is true, is that if you're considering to stop mining at ABCPool, switching off auto-payout may avoid a final manual withdrawal of < BTC 0.2 and the associated BTC 0.01 fee. I invite everyone to take advantage of that.

The 0.01 BTC fee only applies to balances below BTC 0.2.

Our autopay approach may not be a perfect fit for everyone. Our autopay approach is also an integral part of our security measures, so it is not likely to change in a major way soon.

I'm sorry to see it causes frustration for you.

DGM, the reward method used by MaxBTC, does not suffer from hoppers. On the contrary, extra pool hashrate will only lower everyone's variance, smoothing earnings. You'll get less per block but that much more blocks will be found. This creates the same expected earnings but with less fluctuations each day. Of course the lowest variance is obtained from a PPS pool such as eleuthria's BTCGuild or forementioned ABCPool.  PPS pools usually have a fee to compensate the risk they take off your shoulders, while other pools may be fee-less.

Hope this helps,
MC

Thanks for your report Fuzzy. With tables only ever growing, lock contention in the database was becoming a source of delays. Luckily some query restructuring has now drastically improved performance again.

Enjoy

The payment daemon was being restarted. Try again now and it should succeed.

Hang in there for a little while, I suspect the worst of the storm is over as pools are getting around to properly updating their bitcoind's.

NEWS: Your miner may have been idling/blocked past weekend due to a bitcoin network transition.

This past weekend was a pretty bumpy one for pool miners, and the bumps may not have completely disappeared yet. On april 1, BIP16 support should have been activated for most pools. In reality there's quite a few that still have not implemented it, causing lots of lengthy forks in the blockchain and missed income for miners at those pools.

ABCPool has connections with several of those pools, and therefore ABCPool was also affected by these events, but in a different way. The work being dealt out was switching between the various forks, causing Phoenix (but possibly also other clients) to start hammering the server for new work multiple times per second (while being idle). You may have experienced your miner being blocked because of that. We've taken some measures to ensure that we're always on the right side of the fork now.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
MC