My only suggestions on the whitelist would be to consider (eventually) letting individuals decide whether or not to activate it and providing the ability add or delete people according to their own tastes.

I think I've got a 2nd wind - my mind's been wrestling about how to do the black/white list and it was only fairly recently that an appropriate approach felt right. I'd also tried refactoring the code a lot to make the multi-tag queries more efficient... which didn't work so I had to roll back and "lost" quite a lot of effort.

My current thoughts are that the idea of users having their own whitelists that they can add and remove users from is the existing friends list - so I'd piggy back off that. When you mention the ability to activate my whitelist - are you suggesting that the "star user" tag is not on anybody until it's activated? (I've already implemented the ability only to see "star users").

The abuse is frustrating

I'm planning to create other tools to help fight against abuse which should be fairly easy to implement. My 15SP abuse only highlights abuse in the comments and not posts themselves which will be a bit more difficult to identify but I have an idea (posts that have received a lot of upvotes that are only worth a few cents). This should hopefully return even more SP to the Steem team.

The other one is analysing the posts that steemcurators04 - 08 are upvoting so identify upvoting of crap and see if there are linked accounts within the wallet addresses and transfers. With a view to highlighting behaviour like this before it's too late.

Sorry, got distracted by this and need to log off now