Status as of Tuesday, August 30

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good evening! A few updates about what we accomplished over the weekend:

• Much of our time continues to be focused on eliminating bugs from the latest performance improvements to the mining server. Performance improvement releases seem to be the most risky releases, and there have been several instances where we resolved one bug and found that another had been uncovered three days later. We continue to work at these issues. None of the issues has cost any money to miners, and interruptions in statistics are being reimbursed by Chris despite some of the charts appearing anomalous.
• Over the past few days, we have been denormalizing our block explorer tables so that we could improve the performance of address balance lookups. We think that most lookups are now down to about ten seconds, with additional improvements expected once Chris adds a new index to the table. This task should be finished within two or three days, by which time all the explorers will be current again.
• We have completed our website changes that we hope will address issues identified from analysis of user flow and bounce rates. The homepage has been replaced by the charts page, which now has a link to the documentation where what used to be on the homepage is located. The documentation itself was reworked to standardize the headings and spacing. The "expected payouts" chart now displays expected payouts in bitcoins as well as in dollars, which will allow users to more easily discover how we consistently outperform Clevermining.
• We also added some live features to increase user engagement. Last year, a customer requested that the top bar of the site display live profitability data rather than daily averages, so we completed that task and the data is now live. We also added the live data to the header of the forums. Another customer requested live chat to talk about what's going on with mining; that feature was added to the forums as well.
• We will make an announcement later today about our new initiative to support coin communities. Starting tomorrow, we will be offering free forum hosting to communities of scrypt-based coins. These forums will be included in the "coin communities" header of the forums. Scrypt communities will continue to be eligible for free block explorers as well. We look forward to offering additional services to coin developers in the future, as part of our commitment to encourage developers to choose scrypt and use proof of work for their projects.