I've seen celebrations of follower count and rep and lots of other meaningless-but-pretty numbers around here, and never really wanted to do one myself. But tonight I'm going to, cause I got my own essentially-meaningless milestone today: I invited my 2500th user to the @minnowbooster Whitelist.
MB doesn't give a full count - I have one in a spreadsheet - but each page of the whitelist-activity list is 25 users, and today I broke 100 pages. I had taken a few days off to do some automation work on various projects, and came back with 250 invites over the last day or so to hit the milestone.
One of the things I've been automating is checking whether a user is already on the whitelist before they go onto the list that I have to put in the form on the website, which is saving me a lot of time. As the whitelist gets larger it was getting to be pretty common that I would invite someone who was already on the list, or even that I had already invited and forgot. Now I have an artificial memory to do that for me.
But it surprised me that I wasn't able to generate a full list of members from the blockchain. When a user is accepted to the list, the @minnowbooster account sends them a very specific boilerplate memo, and I expected that tracing back their transaction history for who those memos were sent to would get me every whitelist user. But it hasn't. Maybe I'm doing things wrong - I'm still very new to both Python and Steempy, and that was the first thing I did - but in any case I was only able to generate a large subset of the whitelist roster. Anyway, that's been enough for some good improvement in the time it takes to invite users, and as I get error messages the list will grow.
As for the next milestone, well, it's not invites that are keeping me from it.
I've been getting new invites faster than I can find new users for several weeks, now, and they just keep piling up. If we get an influx of good new users with the account creation changes in HF20, I'm going to be ready.
Special thanks to the active voters for making this possible.