Hello everyone,
EDIT, testing complete! Test server down 
SMPPS is currently in testing at
http://ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ If you had a worker account set up on the real pool before Friday, you can just change the hostname to ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com to help me test here
This is mining on testnet, so you won't earn any real BTC. However, if you could point a miner to ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com for just 10 minutes or so, it would be helpful to test the system out!
I'm hoping to be able to move the live pool to SMPPS before the next difficutly change. This means that I would disable stats for a bit, do the conversion, convert all current round shares to the current PPS value, then re-enable everything under SMPPS. This seems to be the best way to do it if I can get it done before the difficulty change, as all shares would have the same value.
Here is the psuedo-code for the new payout method:
http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Shared_Maximum_PPS This payout method will even out payments and provide a constant expected value per share. This means that pool hopping is worthless on this pool, as round length essentially doesn't matter. The 'cost' of this method, is that your expected payout can be delayed if the pool has long rounds. This is the only way to do PPS without charging a fee (otherwise the pool can easily go in the hole.) If the pool is lucky (like it has been!) it saves the BTC to pay out on the long rounds. All said, you can expect to earn much more BTC here than Deepbit with a 10% PPS fee, for example.
To summarize:
1) All submitted shares earn you an exact amount of BTC. This BTC will keep adding up as "Total PPS Work". This is (1 / difficulty) * 50 BTC per share. This is the expected value of each share submitted.
2) When the pool solves a block and gets 120 confirmations (releasing the 50BTC), the pool then tries to do a payout as follows. If the "Total PPS Work" for everyone is LESS than 50 BTC (it was a short round), everyone gets paid their full "Total PPS Work". If the work is GREATER than 50 BTC (long round) the pool pays as much as it can, evenly distributed (If 5 people each have Total PPS work of 2 BTC, but the pool only has 5 BTC to pay, each person gets 1 BTC now, and the pool will pay the rest when it gets more BTC.) It does not prioritize "older" shares, as that felt a bit like a pyramid scheme.
3) Everytime the pool gets more BTC, it tries to pay as much as it can to everyone who's Paid PPS Work is less than their Total PPS work.
You will continue to get paid anything you are due, even if you stop mining.There is a new chart that shows you daily totals for "Total PPS Work" and "Paid PPS Work", and I will continue to improve this chart. It is based on Icey's and Lego's chart code, so I'll be sending them a donation soon.
There has been some criticism of Eligius for delayed payouts. Though we will also be using SMPPS, we should not have the same issues. We aren't switching to completely different pool servers, and we aren't doing payouts with generations (which means the pool can only pay 50BTC per payout.) I think the delayed rewards on Eligius are perhaps because of that. Even if we have lots of long rounds, you will still get paid at a minimum, your proportional rewards each block, which is the same as you would get paid now for a long block, except now you will also have credit for future payments.
