logo by @creativista
New indicator for bots that use earnings to fund projects
As the post title indicates, I've added a new icon/indicator for bots that use a portion of their earnings to fund other projects or initiatives on the Steem platform.
If you click on the icon next to the bot in the list it will take you to a post with more details about the project(s) the bot's earnings help to fund. There is also a new filter which allows you to only see bots that fund projects.
For bot owners, there's now a new setting on the Bot Owner Configuration Page to specify a URL with details about your bot's funding initiatives. I would encourage the owners of any bots that use earnings to fund projects on Steem to update their bot configuration as soon as possible!
I hope that this new icon encourages bot users to pay extra attention to bots that are using a portion of their earnings for good causes, and I want to give a special shout out to @jerrybanfield for the great projects his bot is helping to fund through @budgets and also to @isotonic which is a new bot that is using a portion of its earnings to fund the @runningproject community for runners on the Steem platform!
Reduced Steem API Calls
There are now 50 bots in the bid-based voting bots list, and to be honest it was getting a little out of hand. Every 30 seconds the site would make a call either to the api.steemit.com RPC node or to the API URL of the bot to get the updated bids for each of the 50 bots in the list. That is 100 API calls per minute per user using the site!
I'm actually surprised that things worked so smoothly, however it was high time to make some changes. Now the site is a little bit smarter about how often it refreshes the bids for the bots in the list. Bots with under 5 minutes left in the current bidding round will now update every 10 seconds (for those of you who like to sneak bids in at the last minute!) and bots with under 20 minutes left will update every 30 seconds. All other bots will only update once every 5 minutes.
Additionally only the bots that are currently being shown in the list will update at all. This means if you use the vote value slider to show only bots with over $100 vote value then only those bots will update and all bots with under $100 vote value will not update at all unless you adjust the slider so that they will be shown.
By my estimates this change should lead to around a 90% reduction in API calls made by the site, if not more.
Various other bug fixes and changes
I want to thank everyone who took the time to test the site more thoroughly than I have and submit issues that were found in the GitHub repo! I'm happy to report that all reported issues have been fixed, but I'm sure there's still some more out there so please keep up the detective work and let me know what you find! The list of resolved issues are:
- Steem Connect Fails from Curation Reward Estimator
- Steem Bot Tracker 404 Error
- curation calculator slider is not working when the value is over 500$
- Bot owner config tool says account is not found if json_metadata on the account is empty
Thanks for your support!
As always I want to thank everyone who has helped and supported me in creating this tool. I love that it has been able to help so many people learn about and use vote selling services to promote their content and grow their following and earnings on the Steem platform. Please stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!
Links to relevant commits:
- Added funding icon and limited refresh time for bid bots
- Some fixes to SteemConnect login
- Fixed a number of small reported issues
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors