Taking time to think: finding bugs, planning new features for FOSSbot

Taking time to think

It's important to take some time to think and get a bit of perspective. This especially goes for software projects with small teams as it's easy to run down the wrong path, or waste time on trivial or unimportant areas.

That's what I've been doing since the release of the Steem FOSSbot Voter app I created, which seemed to make a small but overall good impression on those who found it. A few raised issues with bots in general, and I'd like to look at the "bot problem" quandary in a further article. But anyway, thanks to all of you who gave it a look! 😄 🤝 😋

I'm getting ready to start on bug fixing and minor improvements (tracked as milestone 1) next week, which is planned to be finished by the end of April, but I hope to finish sooner if possible.

After that I'll be looking at the Golos fork and major feature improvements.

Finding bugs, making suggestions

I'd like to personally thank the following people for finding bugs and making suggestions, in no particular order (hope I didn't miss anyone):

@codydeeds
@ubg
@kingscrown
@svamiva
@furion
@beeskee

It's feedback and suggestions that make these kind of projects work and stay relevant, so with that in mind...

This is a call

It would help the project a lot if anyone who is using the Voter bot can log any issue they encounter as an issue on the GitHub issue tracker. If don't have / want an account, you can post as a comment to this post.

That also goes for suggestions and requests for features. Since release I've heard some great ones and I've thought of a few too.

New projects in general

The Steem-FOSSbot organisation is still very small, i.e. it's just me. I'd love for other devs to join me, and it doesn't have to be on the projects that are already there. My hope is that it develops into a kind of loose collection of collaborators and contributors under the banner of FOSS for Steem.

I realise I might get a bit of criticism for starting such a project, trying to "own" FOSS on Steem, but it's not like that, it's all in the spirit of free software and openness.

There's two good reasons to do this, among others:

1. Reduce duplication of effort - it's great to try out things that were done before but it's always good to know whats out there, as it may not be worth your time
2. Increase cross-pollination of ideas - browsing through the code of others, seeing what ideas they have and how they implement them, this all helps generate new ideas by synthesis and using those big wet brains of ours to remix what we see.

Suggest an idea for a new project

I released the mini web app What Tags (source here) earlier this week. It graphs the tag usage of your followers in pretty charts. It was a fun little project made as a request to a random idea someone had.

Since then I've gotten as suggestion from @eroche to make a similar web app to look at votes instead of tags. This made me think it'd be great to collect ideas together for other projects I or hopefully other dev might make for Steem.

So you can use this issue tracker at the web app project to suggest ideas for new apps, be they bots, web apps or whatever!

It will be a kind of summary of what's going on in the organisation. All the projects have tickets there, have a look for yourself 😜

Existing issues to get involved on

on Voter

There are a few ideas for the two current beta released project which are marked help wanted and question. I'd like to draw attention to them here as in most cases work will not be done on them without some feedback and a second opinion.

• #7: Adding voting power conservation, a really important issue as voting power is always at 100% now and is only conserved indirectly via restricting votes per day
• #11: Add more "personalisation" to web app UI, is the UI too plain? Should it be customised per user a bit?
• #30: New metrics: more author stats, some stats on authors were planned but not implemented, looking for feedback on how to do these
• #39: Should optionally vote on more that last 100 posts, this was suggested, is this something people would like to see? If so looking for help thinking of how to integrate it
• #40 Get "resteemed" posts feed, currently we only look at the new posts feed, but others are available
• #43 Should re-score old posts?, a post might change score over time, should we check again later in case it would be good to vote on?

Other stuff I'd like to bring attention to is that I'm thinking of replacing steem.js library usage with steemdata, @furion tells me it's much much faster, so I'll probably do it.

Not only that, but it occurs to me that the idea of pulling metrics from posts could be useful for other applications so I've registered the idea here to make a separate, standalone API to generate metrics about a post. This would pull out the existing metrics engine from Voter. Modular, like lego 😆

What Tags

That goes for What Tags too, steemdata will probably be added, it really needs a speed increase as you'll know if you've tried it! Just type in user ned to see what I mean 😉

There are no bugs reported yet on What Tags! Either that's very good sign or a bad one! Let me know if you find one.

Bug bounty

I'm not really wealthy in terms of Steem dollars but I'd like to share what little I have as bug bounties. I'll give 1 SD to the reporters of the first 10 new bugs that get logged and accepted (i.e. are actually bugs and not duplicates), for any project. I'll keep a list of that here too.

If you log on GitHub, please remember to include your Steem username, but watch out for linking to some GitHub user. I use (at)personz instead of @personz because GitHub have their own mentions system.

I realise that I risk getting on the wrong side of people for this but just take it as a bit of fun and a small incentive to get involved. I'll keep this post up to date with the progress of the bounty (actually, it might be a cool idea to build an app to track bounty programmes...)

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading this update and appeal, and thanks to everyone who tried it and has supported posts about this stuff. It's a labour of love and everything created is created for free. My goal is just to learn more about Steem and what kind of applications can be built on it, as well as get to know people who are interested in this kind of thing and collaborate with them.

🙂 🙌 💯