Today I Learned that if you're not self-voting, you probably should.
I've been using the steem-python libraries for my bots for several months now, and I've been puzzled by an intermittent message telling me that voting was impossible on an archived post - when the post clearly was not archived. I haven't had time to dig into it, though, so I just voted manually when I noticed it, and went on my merry way.
This evening, I was annoyed enough by it that I went digging, and I found Voting not possible on posts, which has no votes #27.
Apparently, there is a bug in the code that prevents upvotes on posts that have 0 votes. From the comments in that github issue, it seems that it's been fixed in one fork, but not in the official release. (Not sure why the issue is closed, though...)
This means that if you are not self-voting, and you have 0 votes on your post, then it may be impossible for bots or command line voters that use the official steem-python library to vote for you.
Until that bug is fixed and widely distributed, it would seem to be prudent to forego all modesty and vote on your own posts, at least with a small percentage, in order to make sure that steem-python voters are actually able to vote for you.
Kind of off topic, but I've been playing around with python a bit lately. Do you have any links or follow suggestions on coding bots or steem-python voters?
The best link I'm aware of is the one I posted above to steem-python. It has sub-links to the installation instructions and some simple examples, including a Simple voting bot, and descriptions of the various commands that are available in the API. To save the posting key for the voting bot to use, you'd need also need to use steempy, which is a command line wallet.
Thanks, I appreciate the help! I'll check those links out.
Hmm, interesting remlaps. I've been considering self-voting latley, should I or should I?
Well from seeing this, which I didn't know, if I make a post with good content I shall always self vote.
I managed to implement the use of a slider even with low SP, so now I can leave votes at 5% if needs be. My vote isn't worth much at the moment, but I think that people still appreciate a vote.
Thanks for the post, good luck with the bots. See you around :)
Self-voting has been a contentious topic ever since the last hard-fork. I have held the opinion that what matters is the quality, not the author. Just like we shouldn't publish spam, we also shouldn't vote for it, but I see nothing wrong with voting for one's own quality content. If, foregoing a self-vote also means foregoing votes by others, that's just another factor to reinforce that opinion.
As I understand the bug, a 5% would be plenty to avoid it. I believe that the net_rshares on the post just needs to be non-zero.
Ahh ok, that makes sense. But 5% of what? My 5% is different to yours (at the moment :p haha).
I guess by making a small self vote like 5% for eg is a good medium ground I think.