Post Promoter JavaScript Voting Bot Updates

It's only been two days since I've created the Post Promoter JavaScript voting bot software and it's already had a good bit of interest. As I suspected there's a bunch of people like myself who are familiar with JavaScript but not Ruby and would prefer a JS-based voting bot so they can make changes to the code themselves.

Anyway, I spent some time today knocking a few more items off the to-do list to bring it closer to par with the feature-set of the drotto bot software.

The following new features have been added:

Ability to change the vote weight / bid window length

Set the "batch_vote_weight" config setting to the total weight of the votes the bot gives out each batch or round. 100 means the bot will give a total of a 100% upvote every 2.4 hours, 50 means the bot will give a total of a 50% upvote every 1.2 hours, etc.

Added a blacklist option

There's been a lot of concern lately about spammers using voting bots to promote their posts, so now you can blacklist them from your bot! Just add their account names to the "blacklist" array config setting like so:

"blacklist": ["account1", "account2"]

Auto-refund ability for invalid bids

If any bids are sent that are invalid or unable to be upvoted for any reason (post too old, already voted on by the bot, bid amount outside accepted range, etc) the bot can automatically refund the bid amount to the sender. Enable this by setting the "refunds_enabled" setting to true.

You will need to set the ACTIVE_KEY environment variable to the private active key for your bot account in order for the bot to be able to issue refunds. You can do that like so:

export ACTIVE_KEY=[active_key]

Also you can specify a list of accounts that should not get a refund. This is useful for exchanges like bittrex, blocktrades, etc. If you use those to fund your bot account you don't want it to send it back! You can add any account names to which you don't want the bot to send refunds to the "no_refund" array in the config settings like so:

"no_refund": ["bittrex", "poloniex", "openledger", "blocktrades"]

Note that bids sent for posts authored by accounts on the blacklist will not get refunded!

Disabled mode

If you want to shut down your bot and/or stop accepting bids for any reason, you can put it in "disabled_mode" which means it will automatically refund ALL bids sent to it. This is a good practice since users may not know you've shut down your bot and continue to send it bids for a while. Just set "disabled_mode" to true in the config settings.

That's it for now, but I think that gets it to a point where it's a viable alternative for drotto for those of you who would prefer JS over Ruby. I forgot to mention in my initial post that this is the first nodejs project I've ever done, so please let me know if I've done anything incorrectly or if there's a better way to do things. I really appreciate any contributions from the great coders out there in the Steem community!

Link to code commit: https://github.com/MattyIce/postpromoter/commit/fc790747396931ceeb858c3e4db901ac1d8d6d72

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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