Steem Bot Tracker - Some New Updates
Hello to everyone in Steem-land! I hope you all had a wonderful new years holiday, but now it's back to work so I'm kicking off the new year with some updates to the Steem Bot Tracker Website which I hope will help bot users and owners alike!
New indicator for bots which provide a bid API
Ever since I first launched the bot tracker over 3 months ago (wow has it really been that long?) I've had to deal with trying to accurately determine which bids are accepted in each round by each different bot. This is a much, much harder task than it sounds since every bot works a little differently and there are tons of different scenarios that come up.
About a month ago I decided to try to approach this problem from a different angle - rather than having the bot tracker try to figure out which bids the bots do or do not accept, the bots should supply this information to the bot tracker instead.
So to achieve that I created an API spec that any bot can use to provide a list of exactly which bids they have accepted and will bid on in both the current and previous bidding round. This API was included as a default feature of the post promoter bot software, so any bots using that should be able to provide this information easily, and some other bots have also implemented this API on their own as well.
The bot tracker website has always used this API if one is available, but there was no way for users of the site to tell which bots provide this API and which do not. I have now just added a new indicator icon next to the bots which provide a bids API so users of the site can easily see it.
This is important for users because it means the data shown on the bot tracker site should be 100% accurate for those bots, since they themselves are reporting which bids they have accepted.
My advice to any users who are new or inexperienced with using voting bots is to only use bots which have both this new icon and also the automatic refund icon, since they mean that the information shown on the site is accurate and you will receive a refund if you make any mistakes.
Changed pre-vote / front-runner icon
This is a minor change, but worth mentioning. The previous icon for bots that have a pre-vote / front-runner group was just a check mark which was both not really a great icon and also too similar to the new API icon, so I changed it to something I think is more fitting:
Added Max Post Age Column to Bid Bots Table
As those of you keeping up with the Steem voting bots news may know, @grumpycat recently made a post calling for bots to limit the max age of posts submitted to 3.5 days. I'm not trying to get in the middle of any flag wars, and I'm not taking any sides nor condoning or condemning any behavior, but at the very least I thought that the max post age that each bot allows should be shown on the site so users don't submit posts that are older than allowed.
As an aside, I do think that changing the max post age accepted by bots to 3.5 days or thereabout is a good idea since it supports the use of vote selling services as post promotion tools rather than instant profit generation tools. I am considering making that change on the @postpromoter bot in the near future - not in response to any threats, but only because I support the idea.
Anyway, I have manually entered the max post age information I could find for all of the larger bots, but if it says 'unknown' or is incorrect for your bot please update your settings using the bot owner config tool and the site will pick up the changes.
Bot Owner Config Tool Updates
For all of you bot owners out there (there are quite a few of you these days!) I encourage you to keep your bot settings updated in the json_metadata of your bot account. You are free to do that yourself or use the Bot Owner Config Tool provided on the bot tracker website.
Three new settings have been added since the last update:
As I mentioned above, you can now specify the max age of posts that are accepted by the bot. Again I strongly encourage all bot owners to update this setting as soon as they get a chance. At the very least it should reduce complaints for invalid bids.
Separate minimum bid amount settings for STEEM and SBDs - now that STEEM and SBD prices are all over the map, bot owners can specify different minimum bid amounts for each currency and those settings will be displayed on the bot tracker site.
There is now a "disabled" checkbox which you can use to de-list your bot from the site for any reason. Once your bot is back up and running you can uncheck the box and it will appear on the site again. This one will really just reduce my workload of manually updating things when bots go down.
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 new settings and icons
- Added separate settings for min bids in STEEM and SBDs
- Added minified JS
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
I hope you will consider delisting bots that have a history of scamming users. Will you?
Which bots? You can contact me privately if you’d prefer not to say here.
Nicely done!
I like to see when someone actually loves his product. Like you.
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
You got a 87.98% upvote from @steembloggers courtesy of @yabapmatt!
Whether you agree with bid bots or not, you have to acknowledge quality dev work when you see it. This is really well done. Voting you up for witness.
The bot tracker tool is super helpful. Thanks for the updates! Nice start to 2018!
I should have found your work before :) While I was inventing the wheel you were building Tesla cars...
Great work.
FD.
I just saw your site - it's great work! Don't sell yourself short, most people couldn't do what you've done already. Sometimes I feel the same way when I see sites like Utopian.io which are so much more awesome than what I'm doing, but I think it's important to let that motivate you rather than discourage you!
Thank you for the encouragement...today i spent 3 hours examining your opensource on Git for the postprompter bot and bot tracker.
Learning always needs time.
FD.
I have sent 5SBD to @postpromoter but didn't get upvote.
Can you please check the status or refund ?
Thank you.
FD.
pretend I am stupid and explain what these bots are and why I want to track them
Voting bots are simply a way to promote content on the Steem platform. If you don't have a lot of followers and/or not a lot of Steem Power you can use the voting bots to promote your posts and get them seen by a lot more people. If the posts are good then you will gain more followers and more organic upvotes as a result.
The steem bot tracker website shows you all of the information you should need to promote your posts effectively using the voting bots.
If I use the config tools, the account that configure, does it become a bot?
Thanks, your page is excellent.
No it does not become a bot, it just adds configuration data to your account that the bot tracker site can read. To set up a bot you need to run software to automatically transact and vote from the account.
Ah ok, thanks. Where could I get this software? I am very interested in create a bot and configure it.
Thanks again for your time.
You can get the post promoter software that I wrote here: https://github.com/MattyIce/postpromoter also if you're not technical and/or don't want to run the software yourself I offer a bot hosting service where we host and run the bot for you. You can reach out to me on steemit.chat or discord if you want to discuss.
Thanks friend, tonight or tomorrow, I will write you. You are fantastic.
Hi, can I find you in Discord? This is my user malonmar#0459
If you can, this weekend I would like to talk with you.
Regards my friend.
I don't think we're in any of the same discord servers, here's a link to the PALnet discord, you should be able to find me there: https://discord.gg/hQxq6s
Thanks, I am there. When I can connect, I will find you.
This is an amazing tool, Matt! I'm just getting started using it.
I have no idea what's in your dev queue but here's a suggestion: You have information on the Last Round in the Details overlay. The parameter I find most useful there is ROI as this can be telling information for bidding at the last minute. While I understand that you can have only so many columns, Last ROI gets my vote.
Another useful way to display ROI data would be a chart or list over time (outside of current UI) if you store the data.
Thanks again! You got my vote for witness.
Thanks @cryptochain! The thing is that the ROI in the last round really doesn't tell you anything about the ROI might end up being for the current round, so i'm not sure how useful that would be by itself.
I am currently not storing any information outside of the current and last rounds, but I would like to start doing that at some point and then I could show an average ROI over a number of rounds for each bot which would start to get more useful I think.
I picked the Last Round ROI because you are already calculating it :-)
I haven't watched enough to see how time of day affects ROI but I assume the 4 main US time zones have a big effect on bidding. If true, Last Round ROI would be an indicator of where bidding stands.
A chart or trailing average or average for time/day would be more telling but as you confirmed, it is outside of the current scope of the app.
I also realized that this is more of an investment than promotion tool except I'd rather get free advertising than have to pay.
Thanks again!
oh boy so you are the one behind steembottracker. a sincere thanks to you for starting this. i have used this wonderful tool many times and had great rewards and i'm pretty happy with the recent enhancements to the tool specially the accurate blue tick mark. You have contributed so much to the fellow steemians and that is at no cost. If i were in your shoes, i would have made it a paid tool. Kudos brother. Keep growing and rocking.
Thanks @hemanthoj, really glad it's helping you!
I've definitely thought about this but I feel I made the right choice providing it for free. My guess is that the recognition I've gotten due to it would have far outweighed what I could have earned from it being a paid service.
Yeah true, getting recognized is truly special