I noticed that the Hall of fame list was updated earlier today, but the first post at https://srbase.my-firewall.org/sr5/forum_thread.php?id=157 shows that I haven't found any primes yet.

This seems a bit strange since my profile at https://srbase.my-firewall.org/sr5/show_user.php?userid=3161 says that I've done 54,646 tasks. Those tasks did not include TF credit.

Am I just unlucky, or is it common to test 54000+ candidates and not find any primes?

I would say somewhat unlucky but probably not that much since there are ALOT of numbers we go thru!! As you can see by my own stats I have probably done ALOT more tasks here than you have but have only found 3 I think. Yes it's fun to find one but to me it's also good to go thru the chaff too.

I am not sure how we are going to complete the goal for S79 with 42K of the n range uncompleted.

I have discussed this yesterday with the CRUS admin. I dont think that we can finish this. Its nearly 3 times longer in the 50-100k range. The deadline is 1d and we have over 7M WUs left. We could complete it up to 80k. This is more realistic.

Why not shorten the deadline? This will give you a shorter turnaround time

I am not sure how we are going to complete the goal for S79 with 42K of the n range uncompleted.