Just leaving my feedback for elmad's latest cpuminer: impressive.

The minerd-corei7-avx executable boosted my Xeon E3 performance almost 250%. This single-handedly took each core thread from 22 KH/s to 55 KH/s. In practical terms, in spite of the big difficulty rise, I'm still mining and getting a few coins a day.

Also, seconding the idea to enable more community features at darkcoin.io. A forum (easy setup, smf type) and a wiki would be very good.