Steve Sokolowski wrote:Hi!
- Over the past few days, there were duplicate shares inserted that increased profits by 15% over what was promised. Because of the earlier share issues, we don't plan to adjust profit downward, so everyone can consider the additional earnings as a gift for dealing with the issues last week. Thanks! Note that even if the same coins are profitable today, you should still expect to earn 15% less today because we adjusted for this issue. The WAMP live profitability is what you should expect to earn, and it may differ from individual coin profitabilities because we are adjusting the
- The WAMP server is overloaded again, despite having increased its capacity by about 2x. The website is running out of database connections because there has been a surge in usage of the block explorers. The mining server has stale shares because coin assignment is currently running suboptimally to reduce CPU power. There are also connection issues caused by the VPN with Javapipe.
- The one problem that doesn't seem to be occurring right now is missing shares. The last known case of that issue occurred on Tuesday, and all balances were corrected for missing shares. The "selected recent shares" only lists a random sample of shares, so not seeing shares there does not indicate shares missing.
- There are currently about 100 outstanding support tickets. We resolved about 30 tickets yesterday. Thank you for your patience while we resolve the tickets. As a reminder, tickets are the only guaranteed way to receive a response to your questions, and since tickets are addressed in chronological order, submitting multiple tickets can't result in a faster response. Forum posts and private messages are not guaranteed support methods.
- Most of the problems are due to not having enough manpower to address all issues. As stated before, we will be evaluating whether it will be more profitable to go up or down on Sunday and Tuesday. If we decide to go down, we will close registrations, eliminate features like block explorers that require maintenance and provide publicity that we wouldn't need, and allow attrition to reduce the number of miners as we fix issues over the next year or so.
- If we decide to go up, we will spend money on a better connection and look to start hiring people in October. The main considerations we are still heavily researching include the state of our competitors, the value of coins after the current bubble pops, legal issues that we might have overlooked, and the simple issue of whether if we tried to become rich, our lives would really be any different than simply having an income sufficient to not worry about meeting rent every month. For example, what's the point of having a Galaxy S7 compared to an S6? That last concern is what has been giving me the most pause lately.
- One thing we're sure about is that we want to make our customers' lives better. Staying at the current level has pretty much been ruled out, so service quality will improve one way or the other.
- Again, we apologize for the performance issues lately and hope to provide better service soon! We really appreciate the customers who have stuck with us through this time and I would really like to thank Chris for all the hard work and dedication he puts towards the support tickets!
Thanks for the work you and Chris are putting into this business endeavor.
I'm going to premise my comments with this disclaimer: I'm not going to complain about what was up or down or what profit was missed vs what was awarded. My take away is perhaps a different perspective than others, it's maybe one that isn't being talked about or realized by others.
if I understand correctly, there are known drainers to the site and pool performance that are being caused by extracurricular functions or services such as block explorers. It's my understanding that due to an increase of traffic overall services are being impacted and that this impact is having a cascading effect on other things such as connectivity and general system performance.
To me the simple fix first here is to eliminate these extra services immediately. Solidify your foundational services like the website and the pool itself before adding new features like a touch sensor found on a Galaxy S7 Active but not an S6 active. If you have performance drainers that offer no customer impact or value in terms of coin returns but these drainers cost you money in terms of man hours to maintain you need to look at what value add it really provides. Personally, I could care less about block explorers but I do care about my returns on mining.
Secondly, I advise you to change your registration model and close registration for at least 30 days so you have an opportunity to solidify the systems in other areas, assuming 30 days enough time to make effective gains or progress. Some potential customers being turned away may be upset by this decision but it will allow you to better manage and add value to your existing customers. Separately it will provide you an opportunity (hopefully) to work through your support backlogs by eliminating the "noob factor". To put it simply if you're in the business of supplying a service to your customers but you don't have the capacity to operate at a level equivalent to customer demands, you have two choices as you have outlined, to rapidly expand or to take a step back.
Often rapid expansion creates more problems than it solves unless you've got the "new wheel" that's going to revolutionize the industry. If you truly believe this current boom is a bubble then I would advise taking a step back and stabilize what you have before moving forward with a planned and calculated expansion endeavor.
The last thing I want to see is you guys get burned out and this pool shut down or get sold off to some entity that runs it into the ground. I think you guys really have something significant that could potentially make you rich some day but it's better to take cautionary steps than to take huge leaps of risk IMO right now.
In Summary: You can't please everyone and what I suggest you do next is evaluate the best way to keep the pool going long term while simultaneously addressing and eliminating the problems it has today. I think once you get on the SHA256 map your issues with performance are only going to get worse than they already are and I'm sure you realized this too which is why you delayed SHA256. Registration Suspension will reduce the impact of the flood of new X11 and Scrypt miners being shipped and delivered within the coming 30-90 days. Right now it's just X11 and Scrypt, stick to the basics for functionality, strip away bells and whistles that add no customer impact or significant value and only add them back once you have remedied the issues, added customer value, and solidified the customer experience.
