Hey Everyone!
Today was my 32nd day on SteemIt. Twice so far in my time here I have had a weird anomaly happen. The second time it happened was last night into today. I was literally not doing anything on the site at all and then when I came to the site and tried to catch up on replies and maybe upvote some posts and got an error message about being out of bandwidth.
How could this be possible? I was busy doing other things and hadn't reloaded or viewed anything on the site for hours. The past few days I have spent a ton of time on the site and had no issues at all. Why is this happening?
At some point I pulled up a great resource I had found the last time this happened, Steemd.com . On this site you can check your current voting power and your current bandwidth remaining, as well as seeing a long list of recent activity for your account.
To use the site just go to the address above and add a forward slash and @ yourname, so for me https://steemd.com/@randomwanderings
And yes, you can check this for other people as long as you have their @name.
When I checked the site for the first time last night it said my bandwidth was -83.7%. In subsequent checks I noticed it was bouncing all over the place within minutes of the previous check. It ranged from -43% up to -160%. Even though I had been through this once before I was clueless as to what was happening.
The biggest issue is when it happens you cannot post, upvote, edit, comment (to someone who might be able to help), and at times not be able to do any Wallet functions. This is horrible for someone who has been through it before, but imagine how it feels if you are brand new to the site (as I was the first time). You begin wondering what you did wrong. Did you break a rule of some sort? Did you overuse some function of the site? Have you been banned because they don't think your content is any good? Yes, it drove me crazy the first time trying to figure it out, and at the same time not having any friends to ask about what was happening.
This led me to search Google for "issues with my bandwidth on SteemIt" or "I am out of bandwidth on SteemIt". Of course the results I got for that didn't really help and instead just made me more confused. I was so new at the time I didn't know about steemit.chat, but saw it mentioned in one of the Google results. I went there, and honestly it is more of a spam-fest and I guess I would liken it to a random chat room back in the popular days of AOL. People just randomly chatting about all sorts of weird stuff, often times talking to themselves about it as there are 3 others complaining and telling them to shut up. After sitting there for a bit I saw a couple people come in and ask about different issues they were having. Some times it got lost in a fast scrolling room due to the odd banter going on, other times just flat out ignored, or perhaps a quick response that if you are new you might not understand.
After a little while of watching I decided to ask about my bandwidth situation. Luckily I did get a few quick responses simply saying "oh yeah that is happening to everyone right now" with no real explanation. At least now I knew it might not just be me, so I assumed it was somewhere on the site they were having an issue. And soon it resolved itself for me, so I moved on and didn't think about it.
So, now the problem came around again today. I did more searching and found the same posts, and some others saying how it is caused by the site growing. I sat and waited and it was easily more than 3 times longer than the last time before I went and asked a friend in a Discord message about it all. He has been here much longer and is rather knowledgeable about things. He explained to me how it was a glitch in the system and that it was being worked on. He went on to point out it was affecting any accounts under 40 Steem Power.
That definitely explained it, as I have 17 SP, and I had two others ask me today about it because they were having the same issues, and they too are both under 40 SP. Luckily for me, the friend I was talking to was nice enough to offer to delegate 40 SP to me until they get it fixed.
So, now here I am all caught up on my replies to comments, and checked other things, and wanted to take a minute to post this for all the Newbies to see. If you are experiencing this issue I know you can't comment to ask questions or interact with the site in any way other than being a spectator watching from the sidelines, but I hope this post might help you.
If you happen to have a friend who might be nice enough to delegate some Steem Power to you temporarily your issue could be over. If not I am afraid you will have to sit and wait it out until they have the glitch fixed.
Resources that might help in the future:
Steemd.com - To check your bandwidth and much more.
Steemit.chat - You might be able to get some answer from the community there.
EDIT: A friend (yes the same one who helped be this morning and who delegated Steem Power to me) just shared this great post that talks about the behind the scenes reason we newbies / low Steem Power people have the issue. Go check it out for more answers.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@carmalain7/why-you-have-no-bandwidth-if-you-re-a-new-steemian-like-me