Day 4 on steemit was a learning day.
I kind of have a problem with diving into things, and once something gets my attention, I am all in. So I had plans to take a little break from Steemit (like a day) that were soon tossed the second I sat down yesterday morning with a cup of coffee in in front of my computer.
I had dreams about bots after the previous nights post, I was struggling with the botness of the entire thing... I needed to use them, I needed to own them, I needed to break them.
But first, I needed to set one up to play around and learn, see how they work from the admin screen.
So after a little research I found this awesome article on Steem-Foss-Bot Create a Free Open Source Voting Bot by @stellabelle that guides you through setting up your own bot at Heroku.
After reading trough the entire article (including the comments), I got ready (I want to note here if you do read the comments... she must have updated the article... there are no missing steps).
I set up the necessary accounts, and got started. The @stellabelle article was easy to follow and within an hour I had my very own bot all set up and ready to play with. This is as far as you are going to get with the article, from there, you fire it up to learn more about the actual bot algorithm settings. In the top nav of the dashboard (after it is deployed) you will see a link to "Docs" that teach you how to adjust your bots algorithm to fit your needs (or you can read the docs at GitHub before you start ).
After installation, I spent about an hour going through all of the settings and making adjustments and setting up the algorithm, it was very easy to use. I liked the simplicity of the software, it made creating complicated algorithms easy. Time to get the ball rolling, time to select "Run Bot". After selecting the button it is time to wait, so I waited a little then I waited a little more, after about an hour of checking, my mind started getting a little impatient (don't be impatient) so I started messing around with Heroku.
Thats when I had a great idea!
(It was a terrible idea)
I bet this Heroku server could also mine XMR!
( I really should have studied the Heroku TOS more thoroughly)
After creating a new app at Heroku and installing the a script I was ready to also start maximizing ROI on my free account by mining Monero! I am a genius! I deployed the app and it started running, sweet! Next I head over to coinbase to see if I am getting any hashes. YAY it was working! So I head back to check on the Bot crawl process so I can take more screen shots for this tutorial. Just as I was clicking on the app launch screen, and email notification slid out from the side of the screen ....
"Heroku Notice of Account Suspension"
My heart sank and I knew it was all to good to be true. I opened my email and knew right away I was an idiot.
BANNED!
The Bot did nothing wrong, it was the bots greedy owner. That is why I can not finish this tutorial, and that is why I don't have a voting bot. That is it for my Heroku development career, and thats it for my bot ("I hate Salesforce anyway" I say as I look down and kick rocks). I did get in 1024 hashes before I was banned, but I did not get enough time to actually give you any valuable new insights into setting up the steem-fossbot-voter.
The Bot works great and will not get you banned from Heroku (only other stupid ideas that violate their TOS will). I recommend you give it shot and set one up yourself, you will learn about steem and bot technology. Feel free to use @johngoad to test your whitelist :) if you do get one set up.
This morning I sat down with my cup of coffee in front of the computer dejected, and wrote this article anyway.
While researching links for this article ... I ran into another article here at steemit about PAID voting bots So You Want to Run a Voting Bot! by @yabapmatt.... Looks like today is going to be another exciting day.
(Maybe I will just take 1 day off steemit tomorrow)
Good Day!