I wrote
http://bitcoinsinireland.com/bitcoin-affiliate-network-mining-pool-review/ myself, and then got the torrent of abuse at
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=837551.0;topicseen for it. I don't hide my identity here.
I've come into bitcoin from the video games industry, where I worked a long time (10 years+), and set my site up to do the kind of things we do in games, looking at the product and service providers from my own opinion. And then I got accusations, many incredibly insulting. I checked eight pools, four of which I have published reviews which are at
http://bitcoinsinireland.com/category/bitcoin-mining-pools/. I still have ozco.in, polmine, btcguild and slush in the next batch, whenever I can get the time to write them up.
Most of the pools I've seen have been stagnant from both a UI point of view, as many were built back in the day. I'm sure that the fact that their % of blocks has dropped considerably as more pools came online, discus fish and ghash launched taking up half of the network, and the industrial mining farms take another chunk, squeezing them earnings big time, has made it a lot less profitable to bother updating their interfaces for new, less technical miners like me.
Also, with the way they're paying, I often had situations where I was mining for hours, and because there were few/none blocks found in the shift or scoring systems, a lot of time I was getting very little. Or otherwise, I had suck a tiny % of overall pool hashing rate, I was getting practically nothing per block. I modded some of my four antminer s1's which i outlined before I even started the reviews at
http://bitcoinsinireland.com/antminer-s1-mining-more-than-3-pools/ and this let me put a fixed hash rate on them all at the same time, and then use that data to guide my non-review hashing.
So when I'm not reviewing other pools, I default back to BAN because I get this -
https://blockchain.info/address/1PTq1ofLXaAtPcnMwjHrhonYNCnd3GvD2c - steady lodgements to my wallet, instead of waiting for blocks to be found, and queues.
On the issue of the scam, I think it's also important to differentiate between a scam, ie a company running with someone's money, and a fuck up to a promotional activity. I didn't have my antminers back then, as I only got them in early September. There's a huge amount of people winging it in bitcoin enterprises, and people make mistakes. But if you're going to be making accusations, put your actual name to it.
It does seem like there are a couple of people who seem to jump on any post that mentions BAN, so why don't you just cop on, and sort out whatever fuckup happened before to the community, and get on with things.
I'm more concerned with pools that don't fully pay because of high minimum thresholds (as I'm a small scale miner / 600ghs) out than constantly seeing people bitch about this. I know people are loyal to pools. I was with BTC Guild for 7 months since February on some leased hashing, but when I got my own one this year, I like the interface on this one better than the others, and it's letting me build up my bitcoin wallets quicker than any of the eight pools I tried.