Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

As I've outlined in my initial post, this change was made to make it easier for miners working on the same pool to compare their relative mining effort. The old value (total number of submitted shares) did not take difficulty into account which made the value meaningless for comparison. For example, you and your buddy Joe could have both accumulated 10000 shares, but his shares had a difficulty of 10 while yours only had difficulty 1. Joe would have worked ten times as hard which would not be obvious from the share count alone. The payout system of course does take share difficulty into account when calculating a miner's cut from the block reward.

Displaying the old value in the first place was cause for a lot of confusion around here and some people insisted that they were supposed to have earned just a much as miner X with roughly the same number of shares.

Several community members and myself provided detailed breakdowns multiple times here on the forum. Including detailed code samples. 

This is the third and final reminder to stop spreading FUD.

T = Trillion, B = Billion, M = Million. Mouse-over to see the unformatted value.

By the way, the payout system we are using (PPLNS) is not some exotic invention created by us but is in fact used by the majority of pools out there. Isreali Mathematician Meni Rosenfeld invented it and proposed it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39832. After which many many pools adopted it.

Giving this a bump as some people appear to be confused by the change.

Do your shares increase on the website? Updated have been re-enabled a long time ago.

There are no stupid questions - offensive ones perhaps :-) Think of your shares of stack of papers where new ones constantly getting added to the top of the stack while the ones at the bottom slowly fade away over time.

Depends on the round length. We had a couple of nightmare rounds (Block 784261 for example). Such rounds correspond to Round 5 in the FAQ.

Yes. It's explained here: https://poolmining.org/faq#payments. Pay attention to Round 2.