Photocircle Project update: The launch of @photocirclebot (beta)

Dear Photocircle Contributors!

If you are using the #photocircle tag, then you might have notice by now.

We proudly present to you the Photocircle Community Bot - @photocirclebot!

The beta was released at around 1300 hours of 11th June 2018, which was made possible through the hard work of @smawkward (Photocircle Moderator / Operations).

Bot Task

The creation of bot has always been part of the future plans in the development of the project. A bot that can assist in automating some of the aspects of the curation program that wouldn’t be possible through a manual operation by few persons. At the moment, the basic task done by the bot is to comment on the posts with #photocircle as one of its tags. Here is the screenshot of the first comment made by the Photocircle bot:

Why is it helpful to the project?

One of the reasons why we came up to a decision to use a bot is to help us manage the submissions for the Top 10 daily contests. During the initial stage of the project, post submissions to the photocircle tag was roughly around 10 to 15 posts daily. The scouting of these posts is still manageable. At the moment, we are receiving around 150 submissions on daily basis. And it is constantly increasing each day. The idea of visiting all posts and comment to acknowledge the use of the #photocircle tag by the author / poster is almost impossible due to our manpower limitations. The current strength of our team is unable to cover a 24/7 operation when it comes to the commenting / acknowledgement of all of the posts.

What is the current issue for the bot?

The bot is being instructed to comment / acknowledge a post that is tagged to #photocircle. A few minutes after the post is submitted, the bot will then comment on the post (see photo above for reference). In the event that the author / poster edit the original post & re-submit, the bot will comment again on the same post that is similar as the first one. Basically, the bot will comment everytime a poster will submit / re-submit a post, this explains why some of the posts are receiving multiple comments from the @photocirclebot account.

We are now looking into the solution to fix this issue, for now we apologize for any confusion caused by this issue.

(Edited at 0:30 AM EDT on 13 June 2018)
The @photocirclebot seemed to be operating in order and the issue about duplicate comments has now been resolved. For the affected posts, we will do our best to go through it manually and remove the duplicate comments. Thank you for your understanding about it.

Manual Curation

Just to make it clear, the scouting & upvoting of photography submissions by @photocircle (project main account) is still being implemented through a manual operation by our curators. This is to make sure that the quality is being checked by a real human being. This operation will be kept permanent to the project curation program. We believe that a personal approach to the curation and interaction to the author / poster should not be replaced by any program / bot in this case.

All submissions to the daily Top 10 Contributors contest are being selected & approved by our curators. This is to make sure that upvotes & rewards are being distributed to the qualified Steemians.

Stay tuned for the next development!

With appreciation,
@Funtraveller / Photocircle team

Learn about this new photo curation project by clicking >here<

To learn more about the new project feature, please click on the quest image below.