I've only been mining for about 30 days here in Slush's pool, and there have been several problems in those 30 days. They have all been fixed - except for one (skewed payouts about 2-3 weeks ago) - but I have to say that if I had caused this many issues at my day job then I would have been fired the first week. I've tried to stay positive through all of these problems, shit happens right? But I'm getting a little tired of being continually frustrated by problem after problem. I wish we had some context on why these problems keep happening, that might help us to understand why there have been so many recently. They may be the original pool, but it seems like it's more of a hobby sometimes.
One question we always ask where I work: how can we prevent this from happening again. Might want to ask that from time-to-time Slush.
*Disclaimer: I'm tired, frustrated, on-call, and watching all my work being reversed with each block we find. I'm a low-volume miner so every little bit counts.
I guess in this business there are a lot of alternatives that are easy to set up and easy to switch to... So there is no real reason to stick with it unless there are loyalty bonuses involved... To switch temporarily to a fully working pool has no downsides?
Switching pools for some users is like walking into a dark alley, but today we are being HIT in daylight on the main road.(for some anyway).
Pool failover/switchover is not an act of disloyalty, it is self preservation.
When the problem is fixed you can switch back again.
For me it's not as easy as switching to another pool for a day then back. It takes me about 6 days to make 0.1 bitcoins @ 32GH/s so I have to stay at least 3-4 days so I can get enough mined to hit the minimum amount I can move to my wallet (generally around 0.04 to 0.05 of a bitcoin, depending on the pool).
On a side note - has anyone else noticed that when a maintenance is going on, and the link says to check their facebook page for maintenance status, that there is no status on that page? The page hasn't been updated since November..... Yet another thing to add to the pile.