You want to have the same size coins coming in, as going out.
So if you spent $1 amounts all the time, it makes sense to have payouts around $1 worth of bitcoins.
On the other hand, if you buy more products at $500 value, you'd want a minimum payout close to that.
$20 value seems like a reasonable expected-spending price, hence the default.
Duly noted.
Okay, I see that there is lot of stuff going on in the backscene we are not necessary aware. I have seen a lot of posts in this forum of people being confused by the timeout. Maybe you could add a "request payout" button, that would pay everything that is unpaid (if the unpaid balance is over 2 TBC, to avoid the botnet annoyance), but could only be invoqued once per week/month?
Two ways I -think- could be used to "efficiently" represent this data is eiter:
a) A line chart of "Total BTC you would get" as a function of "Total BTC the pool catches up". So it would be an constantly increasing line.
b) A histogram of "Shelved shares you have" binned in groups of (say) 10 billion shelved shares, in reversed chronological order. Makes easy to see where in the share log is hidden the bulk of your shelved shares.
In fact, b) is approximately the derivative of a), both are interesting in some way/highlight some data.
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A while back, you told about the "?timemachine=1" trick to get our full history, but it is "hidden" because you said that web crawlers overloaded your servers with the requests to these pages while indexing your server. Have you tried using a robot.txt file to request that the stats pages not be crawled? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard)