I think Terk should just amend the policy and say anything below .0005BTC (just throwing a number out there) after fees will be abandoned after a month if the user does not start mining again. I can't see how it's worth the hassle for him and it would certainly cut down on posts about this.
Alternatively, do a once-a-month payment run which clears out any small balances, for users who haven't mined in the last X days.
This is simply not possible with the model when covers payout transaction fees with their own money.
The pool earned 0.00001 BTC on your 0.0005 BTC (2%). Sending 0.0005 BTC costs
- 0.00000625 BTC if sent in mass-payout to multiple users or
- 0.0001 BTC if sent manually to one users.
The first would eat 62.5% of what the pool earned.
The second one would mean the pool would need to pay 10x more than it earned just to send you these coins.
And this is the reason why there are payout minimums required to trigger the payout.
You can read more about it here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448649.msg7420290#msg7420290