The Reports from the Witnesses aims to provide the community with a summary of what all the witnesses have been up to. Every week, I collect all of the reports from the individual witnesses and assemble them into a single aggregated report.

The details here are a summary (paraphrased by me), based on what I found in the individual reports. If you are interested in reading everything the witnesses have been up to - including many details that are left out of this summarized report, please click on the links to view their full reports.

Witnesses can continue posting their posts to the witness-category and/or witness-update tags, and I will assemble everything I find there. If I miss any reports, just let me know and I will correct it. If you have any issues with the summary that I wrote for your report, please let me know and I will do my best to address your concerns.

So without further ado, I bring you the fifth edition of 'Reports from the Witnesses'!

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Reports from the Witnesses 2016-12-18

@abit - Witness Position #4

• Just a small update.
• Worked on code review. Finds Equihash interesting.
• No change made on SBD pegging policy. Current parameters: APR 5%, price feed bias -0.1%. As of writing, market price of SBD is about 1.025 USD per SBD.
• No change made on witness voting list.
• People on waiting list: @roelandp, @joseph, @klye, @laonie, @kushed, @liondani.
• Read the Full Report (12/16/2016)

@bhuz - Witness Position #13

• Discussed ChainBase, which was introduced as part of hardfork 16.
• Explained the disk I/O issues that many witnesses have been experiencing as a result of the update.
• Analyzed the "Platform Configuration Optimizations" provided by @steemitblog.
• Provided alternate recommendations to the ones suggested by @steemitblog.
• Talked about a future improvement being worked on in GitHub that will help reduce the I/O.
• Read the Full Report (12/13/2016)

@pfunk - Witness Position #21

• Has officially joined SteemCleaners.
• Made lots of updates to Wikipedia's page for Steemit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit.
• Working on an initiative for community outreach with the goals of improving communication with the Steemit userbase and increasing it.
• Made a number of suggested improvements to the Steemit Welcome page being worked on by @timcliff and @bitcoiner in GitHub Issue 723.
• Continues to talk to and help people on steemit.chat. Was recently made an administrator by @riverhead.
• Provided input to @ned on SteemSpeak about witnesses generally feeling that putting too many changes into one hardfork was a risky decision. Ned indicated that he's listened, so perhaps future hardforks might contain less major changes at the same time.
• Created or contributed to GitHub issues 872, 873, 876, 865.
• Sticking to a 9% APR for at least 30 days from last reduction.
• Explained logic behind SBD interest payouts.
• Account creation fee is set to 20, to reduce the impact of anyone abusing a potential bug or loophole in the Steemit account creation mechanism.
• Increased price discount to 2% from 1%, to incentivize SBD conversion.
• Hasn't missed a block since the hardfork.
• Despite fears of "dumpening", the price is presently still around the price it fell to before the first larger batches of STEEM made it to market. This is a sign of strength for Steem.
• The non-Steemit front ends for Steem are maturing at a fast pace.
• Excited about Steem now and for its future.
• Read the Full Report (12/18/2016)

@good-karma - Witness Position #26

• Been working with translation team of eSteem, now up to around 35 members.
• The app has been translated into more than 10 languages with help of community.
• Plan to make release today (12/17) for Android users so translators can start reviewing their work in action.
• eSteem desktop application is coming together and will be announced by the end of this year, which will include latest changes of mobile app.
• Started "esteem-features" tag with series of posts, showing features of eSteem.
• SteemAdvent calendar project is going great. Engagement increased and people are getting rewards for their creative comments.
• Market holding strong so far after hard-fork.
• No changes on APR and Feed.
• Nodes are running smooth, without any miss of blocks, 100% production rate.
• Put some of thoughts in a post about private messaging, hoping to start discussion around this subject.
• Read the Full Report (12/17/2016)

@klye - Witness Position #27

• Automated price feed. It is now set to update every 30 minutes in the event the price moves more than $0.001 SBD in either direction.
• After an accidental delete, the Steem.Global faucet site is now being rebuilt - with plans to make it even better than before.
• Was able to fund raise a little over $1500 for relocation fund. A MASSIVE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE who took the time to vote or send STEEM / SBD donations towards helping.
• Will not be sleeping in a snowbank at the end of the month thanks to the Steemit community :)
• Read the Full Report (12/16/2016)

@delegate.lafona - Witness Position #32

• Decided to move witnesses to dedicated servers with more RAM and SSDs without throttling. Right now they are going strong with 0 missed blocks during or after the HF16 transition.
• Plans to move the seed node as well, and hope to do so in the next few weeks.
• Provided a summary of the new hardware.
• Will be keeping discount at 3% and potentially increasing it.
• Had also been gradually lowering the APR, but will be keeping this at 9% for now.
• Increased the frequency of price feed updates to once an hour.
• Continue to use stake to support various guilds and curators to help with the distribution of rewards.
• Have been trying to visit the new section a little each night to try to find a post or two which may have slipped through.
• Read the Full Report (12/14/2016)

@bacchist - Witness Position #46

• Provided views on keeping a strong interest rate on SBD balances, to make SBD an attractive asset.
• Given the current environment, felt it is most appropriate at this time to lower APR from 10% to 7%.
• Gave detailed views on SBD interest rate and price discount policy.
• Read the Full Report (12/15/2016)

@chitty - Witness Position #47

• Provided a list of useful witness commands for the witness community (technical in nature).
• Read the Full Report (12/14/2016)

@dragosroua - Witness Position #51

• Have not had time to move forward on new witness projects.
• Continuing to manage the existing infrastructure.
• Installed and configured two new servers to run as Steem mining nodes.
• Updated SBD APR to 9% in order to match the Steem price evolution.
• Keeping an eye on what's going on. The price of Steem seems to play between $0.18 and $0.24.
• Mining is again being dominated by 2 users.
• Read the Full Report (12/12/2016)

@timcliff - Witness Position #54

• Reminder that submissions for the $50 SBD bounty to create a "Welcome to Steemit" banner image are due by 12:00 noon CST on 12/19/2016 (tomorrow).
• Created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series, with a summary of what all the witnesses have been up to.
• Update on @the.masses account.
• Reminder to only use 4 tags (instead of 5) when creating posts, due to a glitch in the blockchain code.
• Been working on GitHub issues 723 and 768 for updates to the "Welcome to Steemit" page.
• Created a post to summarize the latest Steemit.com front-end UI changes.
• Created a "Special Edition" of the Steemit.com development updates series, to discuss the Steemit dev team's work on the "NSFW" issue.
• Continue to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.
• Most of time will continue to be spent working with @bitcoiner on GitHub issues 723 and 768 for updates to the "Welcome to Steemit" page.
• Summary of witness fund use.
• Continuing to keep price discount at 5%.
• Still have registration fee set to 50 STEEM.
• Keeping SBD interest rate at 7%.
• Read the Full Report (12/18/2016)

@theprophet0 - Witness Position #58

• The Garden of Eden (@gardenofeden) will be using the donations among others to feed the homeless in Dallas, Texas!
• Was able to donate 40.602 SBD to the Busy Platform, for a total of a total of 60.602 SBD!
• Reduced APR to 10%.
• Changed bias to zero.
• Thank you to everyone who is currently voting for my witness!
• Read the Full Report (12/17/2016)

Previous Report:

• Recently finished courses on Codecademy for HTML & CSS! Forsee learning JS next through Codecademy.
• Donations to The Garden of Eden will be able to feed approx. 31 meals. Thanks to everyone who has been upvoting these blogs!
• Shoutout to @jamesc for donating $50 SBD to The Garden of Eden alongside his upvote!
• Currently in the Bronze level (20-500 SBD) for donations to project Busy.
• Nothing has changed with the account creation fee (50.00 STEEM).
• Reduced APR from 20% to 15%.
• Read the Full Report (12/14/2016)

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Some Notes:

• Many witnesses do not report every week, and prefer to only report when they have updates.
• I recommend that you include communication as one of your criteria for evaluating witnesses, but keep in mind - it is not the only criteria. There are some witnesses that prefer to work "behind the scenes", and do not do much as far as reports.
• For witnesses that are not currently posting any reports, I would encourage you to provide the community with at least some insight into what you are currently working on :)

Historic Reports from the Witnesses:
https://steemit.com/created/reportsfromthewitnesses

Remember to vote for witnesses:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you aren't sure who to vote for, check out this Witness Voting Guide!