STEEM Autovote Bot
Introduction
STEEM Autovote is a simple autovoting solution for STEEM users. Features include :

Simple, customizable YAML configuration file
Allows users to monitor multiple accounts and autovote posts (not comments)
Multiple accounts can autovote any monitored account
Monitored accounts can be autovoted immediately or within a random time frame for each voting account
Monitored accounts can be autovoted with a prescribed frequency for each voting account
Upvotes only
Dependencies
STEEM Autovote has only two dependencies: PyYaml and Requests.

On Ubuntu, these dependencies can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get install python-yaml python-requests
Configuration
Example configuration files are provided in the Examples directory as example1.yaml and example2.yaml.
The configuration file is specified when calling the autovote-bot.py script:

python autovote-bot.py /home/username/autovote/autovote.yaml
Editting the yaml file may be difficult at first, but the rules are quite easy to remember.

Do not allow for tabbed spaces, only single character white spaces and hard carriage returns.
New accounts to monitor are added in the monitor section.
Allow for two additional white spaces for each sub-list.
The outermost list is the account to monitor.
Voting accounts of a monitored account are items in the sub-list of a monitored account.
Two entries are required in the sub-list for each voting account: random_wait and frequency.
Example Configuration File
settings :
wallet_password : walletpword
rpc_ip : "127.0.0.1"
rpc_port : 8091
rpc_user : "rpcuser"
rpc_password : "rpcpassword"
log_file : "autoupvote.log"
debug : true
monitor :
complexring :
your_account_name :
random_wait : 0 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 0 seconds
frequency : 1 # probability that a vote will occur
your_sock_puppet_account :
random_wait : 100 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 100 seconds
frequency : .1 # probability that a vote will occur
your_account_name :
your_account_name :
random_wait : 0 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 0 seconds
frequency : 1 # probability that a vote will occur
your_sock_puppet_account :
random_wait : 60 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 60 seconds
frequency : .5 # probability that a vote will occur
your_sock_puppet_account :
your_account_name :
random_wait : 1200 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 1200 seconds
frequency : .333 # probability that a vote will occur
your_sock_puppet_account :
random_wait : 0 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 0 seconds
frequency : 1 # probability that a vote will occur
Random Settings
The block_id hash of the post of a monitored account is used as a seed in python's Mersennes Twister Pseudo Random Number Generator. This seed gets updated for each new post of any monitored account.

Running STEEM Autovote Bot
Running the autovote-bot.py python script requires an open wallet, an instance of cli_wallet must be run as a daemon process, listening on an RPC port. On Ubuntu, this is best achieved using Upstart services.

Please see this guide for starting an upstart service for your cli_wallet.

Alternatively, you can run cli_wallet in an instance of a screen.

After installing screen type

screen

and then once you return to the shell, navigate to the cli_wallet directory and then type

./cli_wallet -u user -p password --rpc-endpoint=127.0.0.1:8091
-d 2>cli-debug.log 1>cli-error.log
Detach the screen with Ctrl + a and then Ctrl + x and you now have a cli_wallet daemon running.

There are at least 2 ways you can run the STEEM Autovote Bot.

Use screen and navigate to the appropriate directory, and then run this process in the screened shell with python autovote-bot.py autovote.yaml
Use an upstart service
Running as an Upstart Service
It is highly desirable to run the STEEM Autovote Bot as an upstart service so that on reboot and termination, a respawn of the process will occur.

Save the following script in /etc/init/steem-autovote-bot.conf (editted for your own system)

steem-autovote-bot service - steem-autovote-bot service for user

description "STEEM Autovote bot"
author "Ima User [email protected]"

Stanzas

Stanzas control when and how a process is started and stopped

See a list of stanzas here: //upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Stanzas

When to start the service

start on runlevel [2345]

When to stop the service

stop on runlevel [016]

Automatically restart process if crashed

respawn

Essentially lets upstart know the process will detach itself to the background

This option does not seem to be of great importance, so it does not need to be set.

expect fork

Specify working directory

chdir /home/user/path/to/steem-autovote

Specify the process/command to start, e.g.

exec /usr/bin/python autovote-bot.py autovote.yaml 2>autovote-debug.log 1>autovote-error.log
Upcoming Features
Upvote with weights
Downvote with weights
Random Interval (not just from 0 to random_wait)
Tracking of when (auto)votes occurred and adjusting times to vote to maximize voting power for both immediate votes and queued votes
Acknowledgments
I have heavily modified the STEEM witness steemed's source code for creating a STEEM Price Feed.