How to Help Your Friends Get a Steem Account with Steem Python!

I've seen more than a few people complain about how long it takes to get their account approved. While approving accounts by hand is surely helping to prevent spam, it is also causing a bottleneck for legitimate new users.

How can you help?

By using Steem Python to create an account for your friends, you can help reduce the requests that have to be reviewed by hand, and speed up (and thereby improve) your friends' entry to Steem.

Here's how you get started. The first thing you need to do is install Steem Python. The guide here is the best resource to learn how to install. Installation should be fairly easy on Linux or OSX, but Windows users may need to take a few extra steps to run it. As an aside, if you're going to work with Python, you should really consider running Linux.

Once Steem Python is installed, creating an account for your friend is easy.

NOTE: There is a fee to create a new account. When a new user goes through the signup process, the fee is paid/covered by Steemit, when you create the account the fee (currently 6 STEEM) is paid out of your account. Personally, when it comes to helping a friend jump into a life-changing social media platform, 6 STEEM is worth it to me.

Before you start, you need to make sure your posting and active key are stored in SteemPy CLI.

Adding Your Account to SteemPy

Step 1. Tell SteemPy you want to add a key

steempy addkey

Step 2. Input your private posting key.
You are responsible for the security of your private keys. Make sure your network, node, etc. are secure.

Step 3. Set a passphrase for SteemPy CLI. Make sure you save this passphrase somewhere because you will need it.
SteemPy will ask you to confirm the passphrase.

Step 4. Input your private active key.

Step 5. Set the default account.

steempy set default_account <accountname>

Creating a New Account

Once you're set up, this is a relatively easy task. Again, you will be paying the fee for the account creation (currently 6 STEEM), so make sure that you have the required STEEM in your account, or this will not work.

Step 1. Start by telling SteemPy the new account's name

steempy newaccount <newaccountname>

Step 2. Set new account password
This is the password that the new account will use to access the account on Steemit.com. This should be treated as a temporary password, and the new owner of the account should change it immediately when they log in.

You will be asked to confirm the password you chose.

You will then be asked for the CLI passphrase. This is the passphrase you created earlier.

Step 3. Voila!
Your friend now has a new account, and didn't have to wait for it! But, wait! Now his keys are in your CLI.

Step 4. Delete their keys from SteemPy
Once your friend has access to his account, you should delete the keys from SteemPy so that when you're tinkering around with it (and everyone should), you don't interfere with their account. So go to your friend's profile and for each of their public keys input the following into SteemPy:

steempy delkey <publickey>

You will need to do this for each one.

NOTE: At this point, your friend will have sole access to the account, so make sure they have control of it before you delete the keys!

Now you're done! You're good deed for the week has been accomplished. Special thank you to @felixxx for informing me that Piston was outdated and turning me on to Steem Python!

If you have any questions or problems, let me know in the comments!