Fast-Reply (v0.1) : Never miss to answer a comment again (& do it faster than ever) !

in #utopian-io6 years ago (edited)

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Fast-Reply is a tool specially designed for Community Leaders, Influencers, and all the others Steemians with an every day huge amount of comments to reply.
In this post you will discover the Fast-Reply tool, I will explain why we did it, what is the current state of development and how you can use it !

What is Fast-Reply ?

Many Steemians are dealing with a pretty big community.

A big community implies a lot of comment to answers.

Steem is growing, and Influencers's community too. Everydays many Steemian get hundreads of messages… They would love to answers them all.

But the Steem blockchain has limitation. We have to wait 20 seconds between each comments. Doesn't a quality comment takes at least 20 seconds ? Yes, sure. But sometimes a simple emoji is great too, don't you agree ?

And we have to wait at least 3 seconds between each upvote. It seems not a big amount of time. But becomes troublesome is when you have +100 (or more) to give everyday.

Plus, it is very easy to miss a comment on a old post because people don't always tag you. Even when they tag you, it is not sure you will see it.

With Fast-Reply you will never ever miss any comment because it will appear in your Comment inbox. You will have a specific interface to reply to your followers without being distracted from something else. Fast-Reply help you to be focus on answering comments since the inferace allow you to only comment, vote or both in one single click.

You will gain a lot of time.

Initially this tool was imagined and designed specifically for me, @roxane (if you were wondering why the only flag in the emojis is the Belgian one ;-) ). It comes from a real struggle I had for months.

The verdict of using this prototype ? I cannot reply to my followers with another tool anymore!
It really changed my Steem Life !

How does it works and what are the features ?

This web tool started as a proof of concept. The goal was to find a way to optimize user time by:

  • Finding unanswered comments
  • Provide the ability to vote and comment back in one click
  • Not having to wait the blockchain delay between actions (3sec/vote & 20sec/comment)

Not having to wait to continue voting and commenting is definitely one of the biggest feature for this tool. The feature is implemented by storing the actions in your browser instead of sending them directly to the blockchain. A background process is then responsible to execute those actions while respecting the delay enforced by the blockchain.

This means that the browser should NOT be closed until the counters in the top-right corner indicate zero. As you probably guessed it by now, those counters show the number of pending actions by type (vote/comment) in the queue.

It is now growing past those features. Stay tuned for updates !

Live Demo

A live demo is available: HERE

At the moment, the features included are :

  • You can log into Fast-Reply using SteemConnect, using the posting role.

  • A clear interface that you can use when you need to focus when answering comments. It just look and works like a mail Inbox

  • You will receive all the comment made directly on a post you have written or a comment you have made.

Capture d’écran 2018-05-21 à 17.49.50.png

  • Numbers of comment waiting for answers. (1)
  • Your percentage of Voting Power (2)
  • Queue comments (3) and votes (4) pending for delayed posting
  • A button to reload all the new comments received (5) (please only use after 10 min idle atm)

  • Filtering of comments by post

Sans titre (1).jpg

  • Voting Power Slider : you can upvote a comment from 0.5% to 100%. The selected VP stays the same between comments (and also between sessions!).
  • You can already reply / vote & reply / vote / ignore a comment in one click
  • Follow, unfollow or ignore a user
  • Emojis (basic support for now)
  • The user name already written in the comment so you don't have to write it to tag the person
  • Severals links to redirect to:
    • The Steemit user profile
    • The comment in the post can be accessed using the paperclip icon

Fast-Reply, what are the future stage of developpment ?

There are some features that we would like to implement :

  • Fixing some bugs
  • Improve the user interface (design)
  • Total rework of the code using Vue.js 2 component architecture
  • Get all the comments / posts where you are tagged in (mentions)
  • Comment with Gifs
  • Comment with more emojis
  • Add images (Drag & Drop)
  • Voice comment (just kidding, we can't do that even if we would love too)
  • Customizable answers templates (example : links to discord / links to useful ressources / welcoming comment, whatever you use most!)
  • Persistance of pending comments & votes.
  • Possibility of downvote (to fight the spam)
  • Show vote value in SBD
  • Markdown preview for comments
  • Responsive design (mobile/tablet/desktop)
  • Ability to Pause/Resume the background process
  • More details on the queue status
  • Persist the queue of action to perform between sessions

And we will probably get more ideas on the way ! Be ready for updates !

Fast-Reply, the repository

And open source tool

You can find our code on Github : https://github.com/Comprendre-Steem/fast-reply

… & a project of Comprendre-Steem

Comprendre-Steem is the first educational plateform with the aim to explain Steem and help with the onboarding process of new french users.

For that purpose, a website has been created to gather all the important pieces of information in french. All kind of useful information are available on that website from markdown tutorial to translated Steem White and Blue Papers, but also video tutorial on Steem and its tools.

Behind Comprendre-Steem there are @roxane and @oroger.

@roxane has been daily teaching Steem and its ecosystem for almost one year. She has the ideas, she does the beta testing, the blogging part and all the networking.
@oroger is more focused on the technical understanding and support regarding the blockchain and development aspects. He is the magicien behind the code. He is also one of the dev' behind Steemitworldmap.

From educational videos to the publication of the french community statistics to the Steem presentation in real life, we do everything in team !

In fews days, Comprendre-Steem will celebrate it's first Steem Birthday !

Technical stuff

Fast-Reply is written in Vue.js. This is a client-side only tool, so all you need is a webserver. For the live demo we are using Surge.sh (check it out if you do not known it, it's awesome!), but you can also run it locally (see here under for examples), the application will then be available on http://localhost:8080.

We have used severals technologies : Javascript, Vue.js, SteemConnect, SteemJS

npm

> sudo npm install http-server -g
> http-server -p 8080 .

docker

> docker run -d \
    --name fast-reply \
    -p 8080:80 \
    -v "$PWD":/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ \
    httpd

Security

Fast-Reply uses SteemConnect to handle authentication.
The posting role is used since the application only interact with the Steem blockchain for basic features:

  • Vote
  • Comment
  • Un/Follow
  • Mute

I want that tool !

We are so glad you like this idea as much as we do !

The good news is that you can already test it with the live demo : http://fast-reply.surge.sh/ !
Just keep in mind that this project is still in beta stage and under active development.

Let us know it you enjoyed it, any constructive feedback more than welcome.

Known issues

Also, the interaction with the Steem blockchain rely on the Steem API.
We noticed that sometimes, the API return error but still execute the requested actions. Safeguards have been put in place to avoid problems but you could still have cases where a comment or a vote has been sent multiple times... let us know if this happens to you.

Also, we rely on SteemSQL to find the unanswered comments, at the moment the Comment table is used. The refresh rate for this table is around 5 minutes. Therefore we advice to reload the inbox only after an idle period of 10 minutes to be sure all the previous actions will be taken into account. We are already exploring solution to fix this issue.

Contribute to Fast-Reply

  • You have skills in graphic design, let's get in touch and see how you can help !
  • If you have any questions, contact us on Discord : roxane#6172 or oroger#9694

License

The software is released under MIT License.

Fast-Reply, "waiting no more".

Sort:  

Happy to see this out !
Waiting for feedbaack now! => just kidding, already implementing new features :-D

Thank you to both of you! It works very well and I had been hoping for such a tool for a very long time.

I'm glad to see the new features you're working on!

I've resteemed!

Glad you like it :-D Thanks for the resteem !

This is AWESOME!!!!! Keeping up with replies is one of my largest issues here on Steemit! Definitely going to check this out today and once tried and tested I will resteem and share with my @steemitbloggers discord community!

What a fantastic development!!! Thank you @roxane

Hello @jaynie,
I love your enthusiasm !
I really hope you will enjoy to use it ! Don't hesitate to make some feedback !
And congratulation for the wonderful community, I should hang around in it more, with the bloggers 😎😍

Sent with Fast-Reply

Hi! I like the idea of this, but I'm mobile only. From what I can tell this is a desktop application?

Hello @wandrnrose7, I am going to submit a task request for that because we are not able to do the mobile version ourself. I hope we will get one soon !!!
Thank you!
Roxane

Thanks as much! I'd love to utilize this. :)

@roxane so far I am SUPER impressed!!! :)

😍 😍 😍 Happy to heard that Sweet @jaynie 😍 😍 😍

@roxane me toooooo :) hehe 😎

very nice idea, hope it will help. However, does this thing will not violate the tos of steemit?

Thank you for the feedback ;-)

This application is not using steemit at all... we are directly interacting to the Steem Blockchain.
If you have more specific details about TOS infringment, we would be interested to look into it in order to comply if necessary.

  • Great post and good code, well documented.
  • Please note that the coder will have to post his own dev post in the future.

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😱 OMG 😱Thank you @helo !

There is also a bot on telegram named steem bot which also does the same job.

Cool @rocksg !
Tell me more about it, links, documentation, etc.
Thanks in advance,
Roxane

Sent with Fast-Reply

Search for steemalert in telegram and you will find it.

Isn't this just about being notified via telegram ?

@rocksg Alright, sure this is similar but finding all the unanswered comments is just one of the features of this webapp :-)
Thanks you for sharing this, I did not know about SteemAlerts either ;-) 👍

this tool seems hella useful and like it could save people time for sure

Exact @kiefpreston.com, at least it saved me a lot of time :) So we just shared with the entire community in case it's useful for someone else 😎

Sent with Fast-Reply

I attempted to use the demo, but was asked for my Master, Owner, or Active key, so I exited without trying it for the sake of safety. Why wouldn't the Posting Key be accepted if this utility is only for commenting/upvoting...? It certainly looks useful and I was anxious to try it, but not if I have to give anything besides my Posting Key.

This is such a great tool! I can see myself never going back to using Steemit or Busy to reply to comments anymore now.

Hello @valth, we do feel the same 😎
Thanks for using the tool. If you have any feedback please feel free to contact me ! 🙏

I'll make sure to do that. Right now things are working pretty great. The only problem is that when I hit refresh, it would load a lot of comments that I had previously answered using the tool, so now I had to manually ignore them. However, after waiting a while and refreshing it again, it worked, so it's not a big issues.

Yes indeed, this is a known issue. Thank you for the quick feedback !

At the moment we are relying on table from SteemSQL that are not refreshed in real-time. A few minutes idling should be enough time for it to catch up with your latest comments.

That is one reason why we suggest (at least for now) to wait for 10 minutes before reloading. The other reason it that there might still be some pending actions to be performed.

Persistence of the queue is something which has already been solved (and will be available soon). The SteemSQL part requires some tweaking in the database queries and might take a few more days :-)

Ah, that's great. I guess the best solution for me as a user right now is to just wait 10 ish minutes between each refresh then ;)

The 20 second comment restriction is about to fall:

https://github.com/steemit/steem/pull/2439

Thank you for the link. This is good to know.
Apparently the idea is in the air :-D

However, I am still convinced this tool will still be useful. In fact it will be even better with a shorter delay between comment once this change becomes available ;-)

I agree that this tool will still be useful, because it's a nice interface to get one comment at a time, making it a lot easier to go trough every single one without missing it.

Mmmh that's sounds interresting @isnochys 😎 It was a real problem we were all facing. Happy to read that they are changing it ! 😎

Sent with Fast-Reply

Hmm, I wonder how this will affect the copy-paste spammers. We will probably see a lot more of it now. It's a good thing that most of them has limited bandwidth.

I have to disagree on this one. Fast-Reply is only providing an easy way to stay in contact with people who have already interacted with you. Therefore, It is not possible to create unsolicited messages (aka spam).

Even if it was the case, spamming on Steem would be 1000 times more efficient using automated scripts to react to blockchain actions without humain interaction.

Keep in mind that I wrote that comment as a reply to someone pointing out that the 20 second limit for comments will be removed, not as a reply to a comment about Fast-Reply.

It's my bad @valth !
Then we totally agree, reducing the limit will definitely make it easier to spam the network with automated script I was mentioning.

Yep, then we agree completely, @oroger :)

Thank you for letting me test this out yesterday @roxane.

It is definitely a top time-saving tool. Thank you.

You are welcome @pennsif ! You gave me great suggestions ! 🙏

Sent with Fast-Reply

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