I am just a newbie here, but there are many others like me.

I know it's easier said than done, but I would like to make a couple comments about my experience as a newbie on p2pool.

First of all p2pool was not all that easy for me to get going.  It took me a couple attempts and some help from this board.  We need a "official" set of instructions for setting up p2pool on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  I tried to follow what was out there and kept getting hung up when I tried to run "make" which turned out not to be necessary.  I still don't know what "make" is all about.

I sense that there are a lot of die hard old timers here who run older equipment mostly as a hobby.  That is all good, but I am a newer user with newer equipment and was disappointed to see that there are problems with my S5's and S7's.  I put a bunch of s5's on here only to see my hash rate decline to roughly half.  I am selling off my s5's for s7's and would not be excited about them running only half or three quarter potential speed.  My problem is that the firmware for the S5 took some asking around to find, and it still does not exist for the S7.  My question is how do we attract people to p2pool without making it SIMPLE for guys like me to jump in with our new equipment?

If we want p2pool to grow, we gotta make firmware for the S7, which is basically all the new hardware being sold these days, especially to individuals.

I understand the luck thing, but it is a big rat race out there and the prize goes to the pools with the best performance.  After going back and reading all the comments here over the past year or so, I think there is much room for improvements in p2pool itself.  I plan to spend the next few weeks learning what I can and looking into it.  I will have lots of questions, so please don't consider me to be a pain.

My next move will be to get a book on GIT and learn what that is all about.  I started programming long before GIT and the open source stuff came along.  This old dog needs to learn to git along with the young dogs.  I then plan to brush up on python and probably "c".  I want to get comfortable doing what Kano and the others do where they grab the main version of ckminer, tweek it to our needs, and then turn it into a modified firmware for an Antminer.  I usually learn just enough about these things to become dangerous, but it should not be necessary for a newbie to learn anything at all if p2pool is to grow.

Tom Travis