Hi,

I'm in the process of setting up a new Bitcoin mining pool that is designed to offer maximum stability through the use of distributed nodes and a good level of redundancy, as well as a complete separation of the web frontend from the mining backends. The backend part of this is already running quite nicely based on Eloipool and I have a few miners hashing on it just for testing purposes. I'm in no rush to get this launched, so I'd rather do it right than do it quick and dirty. That's why I'd like to solicit some feedback from miners and other pool operators on some of the decisions I have to make.
First off a technical question, though - has anyone written a mysql user database plugin for eloipool? I could write one myself, but if someone would be willing to share...
Okay, the main other question I have is this: what kind of payment model would miners prefer? I can't and won't do PPS and am looking at ways to reward miners fairly and reliably, with as little variance as possible, while keeping the risk to the pool to a minimum and discouraging pool hopping. Slush's method seems pretty fair, but I don't think his algorithm is available for others to use.
Also there's the question of fees - I'd like to keep those to a minimum, but need to charge some to fund the cost of servers and bandwidth. Currently I'm thinking that the pool should keep transaction fees - above that I'm wondering what to do. One thought is to ask for a 1% donation and in exchange to provide some exclusive donors only features - are any pool operators willing to share their experience with the rate of donations received if that's an option on their pool?
Last question: the plan is to have the pool as a Stratum only pool. Considering that most other pools are phasing out Getwork, am I on the right track with that?
Thanks for any useful feedback - any additional suggestions are also appreciated.

Holger