Steem Bot Tracker - New bot indicator, info, and more!

logo by @creativista

I apologize that it has been so long since my last round of updates to the Steem Bot Tracker website. I've been crazy busy between various Steem projects, vacations, and huge storms knocking out power in northeastern US! During that time I've received a lot of great ideas and requests from the community, and I'm happy to share that some of them are now implemented!

If you have a suggestion or feature request I encourage you to submit an issue on the GitHub repo for the project. That's the best way to make sure I see it and don't forget about it!

New Config Settings for Bid-Based Voting Bot Owners

A number of new features have been added to the bid-based voting bot software packages over the past few weeks and I've started to add them to the bot owner configuration tool so that they can be shown on the bot tracker website.

The new settings are as follows:

• Min Post Age - This is the minimum age (in minutes) of a post that can be submitted to the bot. If this is set to 20 minutes, then if a post would be voted on by the bot before it's 20 minutes old then the bid will be refunded. The goal is to prevent people from posting some crap right before the bidding round ends and then buying a vote just to earn a profit by circumventing the curation rewards.

• Round Fill Limit - This specifies the limit of how full each round can get for this bot. A limit of 1 means that once the value of the bids sent to the bot equals the total value of the bot's vote (after curation) then the bot will stop accepting bids for that round. This is meant to prevent rounds from becoming too overbid which can lead to a large loss for everyone in the round.

• Posts Comment - Indicates whether or not the bot posts a comment on the posts that it upvotes.

• Blacklisted Tags - A comma-separated list of tags that are blacklisted by the bot. This means that any bids submitted for posts containing one or more of the tags in this list will not be accepted and will be refunded.

I highly encourage all bot owners to update their bot settings here: https://steembottracker.com/config.html

New indicator / filter for bots that don't post a comment

This was a very highly requested feature to be able to easily see and filter for bots that do not post a comment when they upvote a post. Now bots that do NOT post a comment will have the indicator icon shown above and there's also a filter for that icon which you can click to only see those bots.

Added "ROI Limit" column to the bid-based voting bots table

As mentioned above there is now an option for bot owners to specify a "round fill limit" setting which limits the amount of bids which are accepted each round and therefore guarantees a certain level of return on bids.

As you can see from the image above the @postpromoter bot currently guarantees no worse than -10% ROI on all bids. I personally believe this is a good number since I think the ROI from using voting bots should come from the increased visibility and not directly from the bot's vote. I think that a max -10% ROI is enough to prevent spammers from using the bot for direct profit while still preventing legitimate posters from taking a large loss from over-bid rounds.

I hope that more bots begin to experiment with this feature and that a wide array of different options will become available in the near future.

Updates to the Front Run the Bots feature

Previously the Front Run the Bots feature did not take into account the age of the post, so most of the time posts that showed a very high curation reward were in fact just very new posts, and due to the reverse-auction mechanism would actually yield very low curation rewards. Thank you to all of the people who brought this to my attention!

It has now been fixed so that the payout calculation will take into account the age of the post, so if you see a high curation payout for a post you can be assured that it is correct.

Additionally, I changed how the curation payout was presented. Previously it would show an ROI figure as a percentage of your vote value. So if your vote is worth $1 and you would get $0.50 curation rewards, then it would show -50% ROI.

I felt this was misleading since actually a $0.50 reward for a $1 vote is pretty good. As you can see in the image above I've changed this to directly show the curation reward per $1 of vote value.

Updates to the delegation manager tool

The delegation manager tool has been really popular and I've received a lot of feedback on how to improve it. I've finally gotten around to making a few of those improvements, and again I always welcome additional comments and suggestions!

The first update is that it won't let you delegate too much SP. I had some cases of people delegating all of the SP in their account and then not being able to use the account anymore due to bandwidth limiting.

In addition, the delegation manager also takes into account SP tied up in a power-down when calculating the max amount available to delegate, since SP being power-down cannot be delegated.

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. Once again if you have a suggestion or feature request I encourage you to submit an issue on the GitHub repo for the project. Please stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!

Links to relevant commits:

• Added filter for bots that don't leave a comment and added round fill limit info
• Added a bunch more settings to the bot config tool
• Updates to delegation manager tool and front run bots feature

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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