Status as of Sunday, September 18

[Steve Sokolowski]

A few minor updates for today:

• There are two minor changes to the website that will go out in the next week. First, we added additional code to validate payout addresses and to reject saves when incorrect addresses are provided. In particular, the Monero daemon freezes up when an incorrect payout address was entered. Our system opens a database transaction to ensure that nobody is being overpaid, holds it open until the payout finishes, and then either commits or rolls back depending on the outcome. While the transaction is open, no shares can be inserted, leading to the system getting "behind." By enforcing strict checks on Monero and other coins, we can improve website performance and keep statistics live at all times.
• Several customers suggested that they would like to set a manual payout threshold to better control how much dust enters their wallets. We will replace the "ignore payout threshold" checkbox with a new textbox that allows users to choose a manual payout threshold. The three options are zero (which pays out every day, with fees), a value between the network's minimum transaction amount and $1.00 ($10.00 for bitcoin; which pays out when that amount is reached, with fees), and a null value, which pays out when the balance exceeds $1.00 ($10.00 for bitcoin) and charges no fee. All other parts of the site have been updated to reflect this improvement. Chris expects these changes to go out tonight or tomorrow. As with any new feature, there may be payout delays the first day after the change is released if a bug triggers a database failsafe.
• I am hard at work implementing additional algorithm support to the pool. Our target date is currently between December 26 and January 8, but it's very early in the process and Chris will have to purchase a lot of hardware to run more coins.

Feel free to offer comments. We wouldn't have implemented the payout threshold changes without your comments!