A little over a week ago Hard Fork 26 happened, that has been followed by the patch up HF27.
RC Delegations
HF26 brought with it RC Delegations for the first time and I knew this was going to create a change in the way Podping would need to operate.
Pre HF26
Podping is a decentralised messaging system for announcing when any podcast RSS feed has changed. Whilst anybody can send a Podping (which is really just a custom_json here on Hive), the reality is that most podpings are sent via a service called podping.cloud is operated by Dave Jones at @podcastindexorg.
Podping.cloud runs a standard API server through which large podcast hosting companies can send podpings. Behind the scenes Podping.cloud runs 5 geographically distributed servers each of which runs something called podping_hivewriter. These HiveWriters (each with a different Hive account) actually post most of the podpings to Hive. Additionally I (@brianoflondon) run another copy of this to post @threespeak videos as podpings as well.
The whole system was kept running with delegations of around 1,200 HP to the 3 of the accounts (@podping.aaa @podping.bbb and @podping.ccc). Two further accounts @podping.ddd and @podping.eee had smaller delegations around the 400 HP level. I managed this manually using whatever Hive frontend was nearest and with a python script alerting me if any account's resources dropped to dangerous levels.
The HiveWriter was recently updated to make sure it was ready for HF26.
Podpings are 19th
According to @dalz, Podpings are the 19th most numerous custom_json operation on Hive right now. Whilst it's a drop in the ocean compared to @splinterlands, 12,782 in a day is nothing to be sniffed at.
RC Usage
I knew that overall RC usage would rise and this has happened. In HP terms right now, according to the excellent tool https://primersion.com/rc these are the current RC delegations I'm using:
In HP terms the amount of HP needed to generate the RCs which are delegated out has risen by quite a bit. However, the @podping account now has those HP on its balance sheet and I've set Podping to auto follow my @brianoflondon curation so Podping will now be able to earn curation rewards with its HP. Something I wasn't able to easily do when HP was delegated out to the bot accounts.
The RC-Bot
One reason I never automated the delegation of HP was because I didn't want to put an active key on a server. But one only needs a posting key to make the custom_jsons which initiate RC Delegations.
To this end I've written and deployed a little bot which monitors RC levels of all podping accounts and delegates if necessary. Primarily it will delegate from @podping, but if there is an emergency it can also delegate from @brianoflondon and @v4vapp.dhf. BTW just by those two accounts giving @podping posting authority, the only key the bot needs to know is the Posting key for @podping
When necessary the bot will send multiple delegation changes in a single json (here's a typical transaction of this type pay attention to the array of arrays with single items if you're trying to do this yourself.)
The code I've written is on GitHub but it really isn't in a fit state for anyone else to use yet. When life and the code settles down I'll document it better.
You can see one part of the output which is a dash board for tracking the RCs: rc.podping.org.
Blue lines are the RC as a percentage and the Red line is the absolute value of the RC's of the account. The faint vertical lines show where the bot either increased or decreased a delegation.
Right now I have it set to keep accounts RC levels between 25% and 40%. When an account's RC drop below 25% they get an increased delegation to bring them above that level. If they rise above the upper level, and they have an existing delegation, I cut some of it. The various amounts by which I raise and cut delegations are still in the experimental phase but I'm relatively happy with the results so far.
Summary
In conclusion, and now that there's been time for the old HP delegations to return and everything to settle down, RC delegation provides a very flexible option for a system like Podping. I'm not concerned that the notional HP or $ value of the necessary Resource Credits has gone up, that is more than balanced by being able to use the HP capital for curation and other return generating endeavours.