When Was the Last Time You Checked on the Witnesses You Voted For?

^Source

I must admit it has been maybe a month or so since the last interest I took in this matter.

Don't get me wrong, I know most of the witnesses I voted for and what they are up to (not all of them unfortunately, for a few it was just based on recommendation or going with the flow).

But I haven't really taken a look at their witness nodes parameters for that long.

I use this tool wrote by @drakos to check the parameters of every witness I voted for and the ones I want to vote in.

Sometimes I take a look at their steem.chat groups, but today wasn't one of those days.

When checking your list you can notice

• a witness not taking enough care of its node (too many missed block, but be careful, the number of missed blocks usually increases the older and higher ranked the witness is; another tell sign is a witness that hasn't updated the version of the blockchain for a while and runs a version that is lower than most others)
• a witness you know great things about but which you haven't voted for yet
• you gave your vote to a witness which has his/her witness node disabled (usually you need confirmation, because there are frequent temporary disables of the witness nodes that don't mean the witness is inactive, but merely upgrades his/her node for example, and has no backup node to which over)

While going over the list of witnesses I voted for, I saw I still approve the witness @fulltimegeek which is disabled and announced that he took his witness node down some time ago.

Not sure why he disabled his witness node and as you can see his announcement is brief, but I disapproved the witness, because it was a clear case of disabled witness node.

By the way, 572 steemians still vote for this witness, despite his announcement. Until now I was one of them.

Before today I had used all my 30 votes for witnesses. Which means now I have one free spot, which I haven't used yet. I may keep things like that for a while.

If you don't like voting for witnesses yourself, you can always set someone as your witness proxy. This can be any account, including @gadrian, and can be done from the bottom of the page you use to vote for witnesses. One word of caution though, when you set an account as your witness proxy, all your witness votes will be cleared and your account will automatically mirror the votes of the account you set as a proxy. That will continue until you clear the proxy.

When was the last time you checked on the witnesses you voted for? Why wait? Do it Now!

^{... or set a witness proxy as described above.}