Timcliff Witness Update 2016-11-26

Hello Everyone!

Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• The Welcome to Steemit page is now live on the site!! This has been a project that @bitcoiner and I have been working on for some time now, to help present newcomers with helpful information when they first sign up. Now when new users create an account on Steemit.com this page will be the first thing they see! There is still a lot of work to be done to continue to improve the page, but it is a great start - and a huge improvement over what was there before!
• @the.masses has continued to post, comment, and re-steem. Probably the most interesting comment of the week was a reply to a post Get the Illuminati onto Steemit. The @the.masses replied: "We're already here"
• I continued to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.
• Updates to some of my witness parameters (details below).
• I started a new project called Reports from the Witnesses, to give the community a summary of what all the witnesses are up to. It is based on the "Witnesses Exposed" reports that @clains used to do, and will be published once a week.
• I partnered with @pharesim and the Steemit dev team to create a $300 SBD Bounty to develop a back-end search engine (using ElasticSearch) that will support the addition of an "Advanced Search" feature to the website. So far three users have expressed interest in completing the bounty, but nobody has submitted a claim yet.
• I created a Witness Voting Guide with helpful tips for users to determine which witnesses to vote for.

Over the next week, I plan to:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• I support the upcoming 0.16.0 hardfork, and will be updating my witness/seed nodes this week.
• I continue to work on more projects in the background, but I don't like to share details until they are ready. (Stay tuned!) :-)

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: I lowered my discount to 8%. Due to the rising price of STEEM, a discount in order for users to receive approximately one USD worth of STEEM is not necessary. Most users are currently receiving more than 1 USD worth of STEEM from their conversions. I am still leaving some discount in place though because I believe that the amount of SBD debt is still too high, and I feel that this is a good time to be encouraging more people to convert SBD->STEEM to reduce the debt.
• Registration Fee: I currently have my registration fee set to 50 STEEM, which is approximately $7.50 USD worth of SP (at the current market price). This is probably a little on the high side, although it does provide a little extra incentive for new users to sign up. If the price of STEEM continues to go up, I will likely reduce this to around $5.00 USD worth of STEEM.
• SBD Interest Rate: I reduced this from 15% down to 12%. The SBD to USD peg seems to be remaining fairly stable, so a small reduction seems OK. Since we are no longer heading into 'critical' territory for the SBD debt ratio, I feel there isn't a need to provide as high of an interest rate for buying/holding SBD. 12% still seems high enough to encourage a healthy amount of demand for SBD given the current market conditions.

I welcome feedback on any of my projects or things that I can be doing better as a witness :-)

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!

Remember to vote for witnesses:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses