Ok, I don't think I have this completely figured out yet, so the next round might need some tuning.

First lottery

A while ago I started with the idea of running lotteries. It all started with this lottery where I tried to get feedback on an old short story of mine * Ethereal Pixie rings Of Mercy* (EPROM).

I figured out that using the steemit block chain to draw a winner might be a good idea, so I wrote a little script to draw the winner. The script was crude, used web scraping of a steemd.com web page, but it worked.

First bot

Some time later, I noticed there were bots on steemit, and after querying the author of @resteembot, I found out there was a Python API that I could use. So at that point, I started to think, hey, maybe other people would be interested in using a bot that could provide this service. I created a first version of the bot that seemed to be working, for a while at least, it was listening for mentions of its own name and responded by running a lottery.

But then I found out it wasn't always working. The @croupierbot often missed mentions and on many occasions, the longer it ran the longer it would take for it to respond at all.

At one point I figured the API just isn't fast enough. And as it turned out, the part of the API I had been using, combined with the fact that I had been using the default nodes indeed wasn't fast enough.

Current bot

So today I am now running a completely refactored @croupierbot. if you are interested in creating your own bot, feel free to use my source code as a basis, just don't make it another croupier, as it seems there are way to many almost identical bots already running around on steemit, and it would be pointless to let the thing that happened to @resteembot (think there are at least half a dozen @resteembot clones on steemit at this moment that add absolutely zero to the steemit ecosystem) happen to @croupierbot.

So, new bot is running, I did a few posts on its usage and on how to validate it's incoruptability, oh and the @croupierbot started doing status posts so I could see if the bot was starting to seriously run behind on the blockchain once more.

My own fiction

With the bot up and running and apparently being quite stable now, I am now using @croupierbot again for soliciting feedback on my fiction. I am posting draft chapters of my upcomming first full novell Ragnarok Conspiracy, and I'm running monthy beta-reading lotteries. ( This month's installment is currently open to submissions here ).

Bigpanda Fight Club

Apart from me and some spurious test usage by others, @bigpanda has run a number of @croupierbot enabled lottery draws as part of his Fight club, but it seems @bigpanda has given up on invoking @croupierbot recently, likely after earlier issues described above. And who could blame him. @croupierbot had been unstable for weeks before I managed to fix the issues.

Minnow Fiction Author Support Lotteries

Nevertheless, @croupierbot itself started to get upvotes and as it started to generate a bit of money, I had to figure out what i wanted @croupierbot to be. Did I want @croupierbot to make me money? Sure, making money to finance my own lotteries, but did I want it to make more than that? I decided I don't want to make money from a bot. Making money from my content, fine, using @croupierbot to make more money from my content and more importantly to improve the quality of my content? Perfect! But money from a bot? No! Money that goes to bots is money that hurts the incentive based economy of steemit that urges us to produce top quality content. I believe the prime incentive of the steemit economy should be providing top content, so money made from @croupierbot should be diverted to support that incentive. If not for myself, then for other fiction authors here on steemit. The Minnor Fiction Author Support Lottery was born.

The first lottery has just completed and the winner is the tallented @lyxng who won with this post.

Her work looks interesting and like my own, sufficiently rough around the edges to benefit from the constructive criticism that I hope @croupierbot helps to promote. So, if you don't follow her yet, please follow her, and watch out for the upcoming $4.0 SBD guest lottery that is part of her prize.

Tuning ???

Now for the hairy bit. The initial idea was to run the lottery, or to run a draw for the current round of the lottery with each $10.0 SBD the croupierbot would earn. The postings of @croupierbot are now configured to pay out in 100% SBD and if this works, all new proceedings should go to SBD balance allowing the bot to do lotteries twice as often as it previously could.

But how about the winner. That is where I made things a bit complicated. The idea is to divide the 10.0 up into three parts:

1. An author price of 4.0 SBD
2. A nomination price of 2.0 SBD
3. A guest-lottery of 4.0 SBD on one of the author's pages.

But with the nominations being posts, and in this case with @lyxng being both the author and the person nominating, I could use the @minnowbooster bot as a way to pay out the price, right?

Afterall, the @minnowbooster upgoat would not only pay out the prize money, plus a tiny bit extra, it would also push the post up the ranks getting the winner some extra exposure.

Well, it seemed perfect, until I noticed @lyxng had paid out earlier, so using @minnowbooster would just be a waste of the prize money. So this time, with @lyxng posting regularly, I decided to still use @minnowbooster, but on a newer post instead, one that hadn't paid out yet.

So, basically, it works, but I'm not sure if the continued use of @minnowbooster in the prize payout is ideal. My current thought is that I shouldn't as it complicates things possibly a bit to much.

If you have any thought of this, please let me know in a comment.