Lots of questions... Just let me know if I should just go back and read all previous posts.
1) So, I noticed the Active Miner page isn't always sorted by descending hashrate. Does it sometimes seem out of order due to those with less hashpower just having mined long enough to earn a spot that high or what?
2) Does being in the top 100 on the Active Miner page denote who will get a payout during the creation of the next block?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding some things along the way.
Thanks in advance for the patience.
EDIT: Found the following quote, which helps with some of this:
A number of short restarts coming up shortly for some updates.
All the restarts are complete. There are now a number of changes to both appearance and behaviour.
The pool work now shows which users have their reward postponed and how much herp they've accumulated. This means it lists the users who will not receive a payout in the next block solved, but shows how much herp will be accumulated to contribute to one where they meet the threshold requirement to receive a payout. This also means that miners below the dust threshold will eventually get a payout once their cumulative rewards make them meet the dust threshold over enough block solves.
Additionally as large coinbase transactions contribute negatively to miners latency, are incompatible with AVA2->7 devices, and contribute to many small miner rewards that end up costing a lot in fees to redeem, I have placed a limit on the number of transactions that will ever be included of 150. The top 100 miners will always receive a coinbase generation transaction with every block solved. The other 50 payouts will be interleaved amongst those who have reached payment threshold and are ordered by who has waited the longest for a payout. Miners will be able to monitor their accumulated herp if they've been postponed in the new user statistic "accumulated" and see how many times they've been postponed by the "postponed" variable.
Realistically these limits won't come into effect any time soon as there are currently only ~50 users that have reached payment threshold. Once we get above 150 active users it will start coming into effect - which would also correspond with a larger hashrate so more frequent blocks, however the dust threshold miners will already be counted towards future solves.
This concludes all my planned changes required to enable the pool to cope with as many miners of wildly varying sizes as could possibly be aimed at it, including what I think is a very fair offering for very small miners.
And now for some blocks...