I'm pretty new to this and just had my first experience with a significant outage impacting my miners.
I've got two Antminer S1s chugging away non-stop (usually) on Slush's Pool. I don't hop, etc. Best case for me is for the machines to just do their thing.
Last night though, my internet connection crapped-out and I was out for 14 hours. Now that I'm back up, my statistics show four blocks that my miners worked on, that now show "none" for Your Shares and Your Reward. There are confirmations being churned-out, but nothing for me.
Is this part of the pool hopping policy?
Being someone that doesn't hop (I dedicate miners to Slush and BTC Guild), seems like BS that I'm being dinged like this.
Thanks, Dan
PPLNS is a time-delayed method. Whenever a block is solved, the payment is applied to the 10 open shifts. A shift takes ~1 hour to complete, so this means each block is split based on the mining activity of users over the last 10 hours. So while your machines were offline, you were continuing to get paid for most of that time (though it shrank as new shifts completed where you had no shares).
When you first started up again, you wouldn't have any shares in the open shifts. It takes a while to rebuild shares in all shifts. This is the "charge up" period, and when you stop mining it's the "wind down" period. They're symmetrical, meaning you aren't making more or less depending on frequency of mining. Each share's payout is completely independent of future and past mining activity. This is explained in the Support/How Am I Rewarded section.