I'm using minerd miners (no default stratum support) connected to a central stratum proxy. That stratum proxy connects to a headless linux VPS forwarding all traffic to whatever pool I choose. All I did was change the IP on the VPS to point to Middlecoin instead of Wafflepool and all of my rejects went away. So something else is going on, because my miner configurations haven't changed at all since I started mining LTC a year ago. I guess I was just having connection issues to just Wafflepool.
minerd=cpuminer? I ask because I use cpuminer and the executable is called minerd, and it has stratum.
Did you ran some network tests from your VPS to the pool servers? (ping traceroute etc.) Because it looks like your shares are "killed" by latency as they travel.
I really don't know how I missed that after all this time. I have actually ran some instances of it without the stratum proxy and it worked and I never even put that together. Most mining pools still have instructions in the "Getting Started" or FAQ sections saying that minerd (pooler cpuminer) doesn't support stratum and that you should go get the stratum proxy. I've been mining for 2.5 years and feel like a fool to have not noticed that and just believed all those instructions because it was stated over and over. But yes, I see at the source that it does support it. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
As for the pinging, I was getting < 20ms from cpu to stratum proxy, 12ms to VPS, and 17ms to Wafflepool. I thought that it would be low enough, but maybe not?