That I don't know... I have 8xA6 pointed here and they reconnect and stay connected without issue.  For example, the last time they failed over to my backup pool was on Monday when I shut down the stratum servers because my datacenter had the switch issue.  When I fired them back up, all of my A6 came right back.

When was the last time your A6 showed the pool as dead and didn't fail back over properly?  Are you on the latest firmware?

You notice correctly.  I took it away because it needs to be fixed.  Until I get that done, it remains gone.  The problem was that it determined your estimated earnings by only considering shares since the previous block was found.  That works out great for a PROP pool, but not at all for PPLNS.  Too many people would PM me or email me or hit me on IRC asking why their payment was "X" when the estimated earnings said it would be "Y".  It will be fixed eventually, I just haven't had the time to dedicate to it (stupid real-world job ).

There was a bonus of 1BTC if you found the block before the diff change.  That didn't happen, unfortunately.  I would have loved to have seen it.  At any rate, there will be another bonus... I just haven't figured out what it'll be yet .  Probably going to do some iteration of the contest we ran last round.  As soon as I finalize the details, I'll post it.