And no. It's not a voting bot...

This is a bot that would actually encourage manual upvotes and engagement on your post. It is an educational bot, teaching minnows in search of upvotes into a habit of first engaging with their fellow steemian, who - like them - is seeking engagement and upvotes.

First - who the fcuk are you?

We are the Voices 0f 7he Underground, which insinuates we went underground to rediscover our voices after being pushed into self censorship. Some good self censorship - as many of my members come as spammers and plagiarisers, learning later as a member how they can do better. Some not so good censorship, as we're discouraged from speaking of evils that evil actors benefit from. But underground is a place to find that you are not alone despite how they make you feel by putting fear into those who share your view.

VOTU #post-promotion channel

On the VOTU community discord server I made the decision a few months ago to take advantage of the many configuration settings available to discord. I made some hidden channels for work purposes and some read-only channels for keeping traffic levels low in order to highlight certain posts and need-to-know information without getting swamped by link drops from new members desperate to get as many people to check their post as possible. This is what makes discord so useful to those of us who are building communities.

In VOTU the #post-promotion channel was made read-only to all members. The one role that could post in this channel is the "curator". In order to get the curator role, you have to vote on a post, or use minimum 100% of an upvote across a few posts - for example 2 posts at 50% or 4 at 25%. They also have to let us know which post they upvoted by leaving a reaction emoji on the post in the #post-promotion channel. The reason for that is so that our moderators can manually find the post they voted on and check that they voted.

This is obviously a lot of work. So much work that I don't remove the Curator role unless I actually find somebody posting without upvoting first. With more than 100 *active members on the server we would be constantly struggling to handle this job instead of doing the work that the community was built for, which was originally just hosting the Sunday podcast which I barely find time to edit as during the week we teach each other steemian etiquette and how to make the best out of the blockchain and our interaction with it as a group and as individuals.
*Active = Having chatted in a chat channel within the passed week
Ever since I started this system, a number of other discord communities have implemented similar #post-promotion rules in their own servers, some of which include Steem Life, The Steem Engine, Steemit Ramble (PYPT), and there are others who have said that if the system could be automated they would implement the same. Automating this would be a weight off all of our shoulders and give us more time to dedicate to other important jobs that come with managing a community.

Thankfully @netuoso has offered to help us out with this, we just had to come together to agree on exactly what we need from the bot. I had thought this wouldn't be an easy task because all of us have different rules in our servers for the channel. The other servers apart from my own for example require an engaging comment as well as an upvote. We also all required different % of upvotes, some of us as low as 1% others as high as 100%. But I was pleasantly surprised that between @shadowspub, @clove71, @sgt-dan, @poeticsnake and @steph4nus we managed to negotiate between these variables to define how the bot would ideally work.

THE ~LET ME PROMOTE MY POST ~ BOT

The question asked by @netuoso in order for him to develop the bot to our needs is

What should the bot see and how should it respond?

1. Registration
   Similar to other other verification bots on discord, the bot needs to first verify that the discord account which is seeking access to the #post-promotion channel is connected to the steem account used to vote for the post that was dropped in the channel.

2. Role Configuration
   The bot could have a configuration command that allows us to designate a role from within our discord server, that the bot later assigns to each upvoter.

3. List of post from each discord server
   The bot needs to be able see and register each post dropped into the #post-promotion channel on a list on which it can remain until the end of the pending payout period. It also needs to distinguish which discord server the post was dropped into - so that votes for posts in one server don't give access to the #post-promotion channel on another server.

4. Upvotes on posts from those lists
   The bot then needs to see any upvote (of minimum 25% power) made by a registered member of the bot on a post from within the #post-promotion channel.

5. Comments
   Similar to above, aside from an upvote the bot also needs to see a comment. Once it sees the upvote and the comment, a role holding the permission to write in the channel should be assigned to the upvoter.

6. Member drops their link
   Once the upvoter drops their own link in the channel the bot should then remove the role that allows access to the channel. Then can only access again by making another vote at minimum 25% voting power.

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I'm really excited about getting this bot developed and really grateful to @netuoso for offering to build it for the communities without hesitation. If you check your witness votes and have one to give, I recommend you give him a vote.

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