Catching up on the thread here...
KnC miners can still use stratum.mining.eligius.st:12234 - I have not verified that this helps with newer firmwares over the main server, though.
As for NMC, there are no stats for it currently. NMC payouts happen roughly daily. I have plans to make some stats for NMC, but that particular item on the TODO list is not a high priority. Also, Eligius is able to pay 105% NMC because a) not all users choose to merge mine NMC and NMC earnings for users without an NMC address setup are not tracked, and b) this has built up a buffer of namecoin that is unlikely to be depleted even by paying out 105% NMC PPS.
Increasing the minimum work difficulty to 8 will have no effect whatsoever on anyone mining at ~8Gh or above. For people with less hash rate than this, it will result in slightly higher variance on the pool stats pages, but that is it. Earnings are unaffected.
Also, CPPSRB is *not* a straight PPS system. Under a straight PPS system, you would get paid for every share regardless of whether the pool has found enough blocks to cover the costs of doing so. Straight-PPS is a pool-takes-all-of-the-risk system. CPPSRB is designed to be as close to Straight-PPS as possible, and lower miner reward variance as much as possible, but may or may not come out to the same earnings as straight PPS. Long term averages put CPPSRB at paying out just under 99% PPS, with 0% fees, which is better than any other pool with a fee can say. For some more details on CPPSRB, see
the CPPSRB FAQ page.
CPPSRB is *not* proportional. You do not just "get your percentage of the block reward." It has been proven that proportional reward systems are exploitable/hopable. CPPSRB is not. If you are a constant miner who has been through some of Eligius's more unlucky periods, you may have enough shelved shares so that the estimated earnings work out to
appear close to proportional, but this is just the system catching up your shelved shares. Once they're caught up this won't be the case. Again, for some more details on CPPSRB, see
the CPPSRB FAQ page.
Hope this helps.
-wk
P.S. - Seems everyone has a hindsight horror story about the rise in BTC/USD..... don't we all