TimCliff Witness Update 2017-01-21

Hello Everyone!

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

• I posted a notification letting everyone know that the "5 tag glitch" was resolved.
• I responded to @gtg's call for seed nodes with the info for my seed node.
• Things have been fairly quiet with @the.masses project. It has continued to post, resteem, and comment. The account's reputation is still at 53. Someone went on a brief spamming spree with the account, but it stopped after I started downvoting the posts.
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series.
• With all the discussions going on regarding flagging, I created a post with my thoughts on flagging.
• I submitted a pull request to change the resteem confirmation message that users get when they click the resteem button. The update was to show which account they were logged in as, so that users with multiple accounts would not accidentally resteem with the wrong account. The PR was rejected though, because Steemit technically does not support users having multiple accounts. They want to target 'regular' users over 'power' users. Even though the PR was rejected, it was still a worthwhile experience for me to work on. I learned more about the Steemit.com code base, and got more experience working with GitHub to make updates - which I can continue to use in the future.
• I submitted another pull request to update the UI so that flagged posts do not stand out compared to non-flagged posts, unless the post/comment gets a negative voting score. The PR was accepted, so it looks like this change will be live on the site soon!
• I created a post to collect suggestions from the community for new users that I hope to add to the Welcome Page. If you have any tips for new users that you want to share, please add them in that post's comments!

Forward Looking Plans:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• I am trying to decide if I will upgrade my witness and seed nodes to v0.16.1. It is not a required update, and it looks like they plan to release version 0.16.2 soon. Based on this, I am leaning towards waiting to upgrade until they release v0.16.2. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know.
• @bitcoiner and I will be reviewing the images for the "Welcome to Steemit" page banner with Steemit. Hopefully (with Steemit's approval), we will be working to update the page with one of the images. This will take some time though. Expect an update within the next month or so. The winners of the bounty will be paid once we decide on the images.

Use of Witness Funds: (No Change)

• So far I continue to run my witness servers at a loss - which is totally fine by me. I believe it is important for witnesses to be doing what they do for the community, and not to make money. I have been able to cover the costs of my servers using author rewards from my blog posts though - which is great!
• If the amount I make from my witness position exceeds the costs of running my servers, I plan to use a majority of my witness funds to create bounties that incentivize more Steemit.com front-end UI development.

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: My discount remains unchanged, at 2%. The SBD peg has held very close to $1.00, sometimes slightly above, sometimes slightly below. Currently it is at $0.99. The debt level is still high though, at 3.1%. I feel that we need to be encouraging more people to convert SBD->STEEM right now to reduce the debt.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee remains unchanged, at 40 STEEM. This is approximately $6.38 worth of SP (at the current market price). This is still slightly on the high side (IMO), although it does provide an extra incentive for new users to sign up. My current policy is to keep the amount between $5 and $10 USD worth of STEEM, aiming to be closer to $5 without going below.
• SBD Interest Rate: My SBD interest rate remains unchanged, at 4%. My current policy is to only update SBD interest once a month (on the first of the month) as summarized in this post, but this is subject to change. I am planning to lower my rate to 3% on 2/1.

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

If you think I am doing a great job, I would greatly appreciate your witness vote!

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!

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