TimCliff Witness Update 2017-06-22
Hello Everyone!
Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:
- I successfully upgraded my witness nodes and seed to HF 19!
- I am hosting a Steemit Meetup for anyone in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area on Saturday July 15. Details can be found in this post. A new post with the chosen location will be posted very soon. Whoever can make it, we would love to see you there!
- I have been spending a lot of time helping users in the steemit.chat "help" channel with various issues, mostly related to account creation.
- I continue to review and respond to issues in the steem and condenser GitHub repositories.
- I started working on a new marketing initiative 10,000 Flyers.
- I ran a bounty to collect a list of tips for new users, which I will be converting into an informative post.
- I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series. This report provides the community with an aggregated report of all the witness reports from the past week.
- I posted a warning on the risks of leaving coins on exchanges.
- I have been involved in discussions on the impacts of the current bandwidth limitations and how it has been impacting new user signups.
- I posted a tutorial on how to delegate SP to another user using SteemConnect.
- I posted a warning to users to be very cautious when providing their private keys to third party websites (or users).
- I am working with @moata run a Facebook marketing campaign designed to attract new users to the site. Details here!
- Prior to HF 19, I created a post explaining potential changes in payout.
- The link in the "Quick Start Guide" on how to buy STEEM is way out of date, so I created a new guide with updated screen shots and instructions. I will be updating the 'quick start guide' with the new version the next time I submit edits.
- I submitted a pull request to update the BlockTrades links on Steemit.com to pre-load the BlockTrades UI with the appropriate coins (BTC and STEEM or SP) when users click on the 'Buy' links. I also added links to the Steemit.com wallet to sell STEEM, as well as to be able to buy and sell SBD via the wallet drop-downs. (Details here.) The changes are already up on the live site, so you can check them out in your Steemit.com wallet :)
- I submitted another pull request to lower the threshold for the 'vote slider' to appear from around 500 SP to around 125 SP. The pull request is still in review, but I am hopeful that it will get approved. Details are in this post.
Forward Looking Plans:
- Review and update the FAQ page to be consistent with any changes in HF19.
- Phase 2 of the 10,000 Flyers initiative.
- Creating a post with a collection of tips for new users.
- I'm still working on a few different condenser pull requests in the background. Details will be shared if/when I am able to successfully make the changes.
- Continue my involvement with existing projects.
Some Information / Suggestions:
- Steemit, Inc. is hiring developers! (JavaScript and Python) Info here.
- I recruited my boss to Steemit :) If anyone is interested in following his food blog, you can check him out here: @willwriteforfood
- Steemit.chat is currently down. The admins that run the site are aware of it and working to get it back online on newer/better hardware. Details can be found in this post.
- Steemit has proposed hardfork 20! The main intention of this HF is to make the user signup process more scaleable, to be able to handle a large volume of new user signups. I like where this is going :)
Summary of Current Witness Parameters:
- SBD Interest Rate: Due to the SBD peg consistently trading above $1.00, my interest rate is set to zero.
- Price Discount: Due to the SBD peg consistently trading above $1.00, I have zero discount on my price feed.
- Registration Fee: My registration fee is set to 0.20 STEEM. This would be approximately $12.90 to register a new account without delegation at the current market price, or $0.43 plus $63.43 of delegated SP for a delegated account. I would prefer to have it even less than this, so that non-delegated accounts were in the $3-5 range, but @smooth brought up a very good point that users with less than 5-6 SP are likely to run into bandwidth limitations. Therefore, 0.20 STEEM is as low as I can go without risking users being unable to use their accounts.
- Maximum Block Size: I updated my maximum block size to 131,072, which is 2x the current size. The intention of this is to help with the bandwidth limitations that new users run into if they have a small amount of SP. Details can be found in this post. With the new proposal for HF 20, I will be reviewing if this is still necessary. I may go back to 65,536 which is what the majority of the top 20 witnesses have it set to.
I welcome feedback if you think there are things that I can be doing better as a witness. If you think I am doing a great job, I would really appreciate your witness vote!
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!
Tim when I get home I will join in on compiling good content for new users if I know of anything good that isn't added. And I will be making a longer post in your flyer comment, I hope it's not to late for suggestions, because I had in mind doing something really close to what you are talking about doing. You are a much better person to do it then me since you will have more people looking and willing to submit good things for you. And I could never offer that many SBDs haha!!
Love the name... reminds me of the Great Space Coaster!
Awesome! I look forward to seeing what you submit :)
give you witnesses vote. you are number 3 who get my witnesses vote :) @timcliff
I am artist. check please. hope you like my art,
https://steemit.com/art/@sharmin/my-art-27-your-upvote-and-reward-will-big-support-for-my-art-school
Wow, that's really good! Upvoted and followed :) I'm a huge fan of the art community here on Steemit. My spouse is an here artist too ( @artist1989 ). As you probably know, actually making money from art (even if you are good) can be very difficult. I think that is one area that is very under-served by the existing platforms out there. Artists flocking to Steemit could end up being the 'big' thing that takes Steemit mainstream, since it gives talented individuals a way to get their work out there in front of people and get paid for it :)
I would seriously love to learn more about how you run your witness. THANK YOU for all you are doing so far its people like you that make this all possible.
This is the best 'how to' guide out there as far as setting up and running a witness node. There are a few (minor things) that have changed since the post was written, but it is 95% of the basics.
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bitcalm/how-to-become-a-witness
I've also created some of my own scripts/tools using code provided by other witnesses as a starting point that handle failure detection and price feed updates. I run multiple servers, and if the main one starts having an issue I have it send a text to my cell phone and automatically switch over to my backup node.
That's all the technical side. The rest of it is figuring out ways to add value to the community. I've just been working on various projects since I started here, and one thing has always led to another. My role as a witness and involvement in the community have adapted over time.
While everybody's still fawning over the last HF, you're already busy with the next! It's good to see that the focus is on new users. It's the "Happy Minnow" Hard Fork!
That's it? Gee Tim, why don't you get up and do some work for a change?
(I now duck for cover as a lynch mob forms)
Wow Tim.. that's a lot...
Yes, I hope more people vote for you as a witness. Anyone can do it. I hope people realize it.
(You must login with your ACTIVE key, if you don't know what that is, I recommend you learn more about keys first).
Thank you for @Timcliff for the update. I appreciate the transparency and your dedication to improving the community
I know some of my followers been wondering about issues with Steemit.chat so I hope they read this!
I am glad that I voted for you.
Thanks :)
Followed
@timcliff thank you for all your hard work you are putting in for this great community we are fortunate enough to be a part of. I will definitely be coming up to the meet up on the 15th in the Twin Cities. I am pumped to get together and talk with others and hear what things they have to share about Steem and crypto and everything else in real time, instead of reading or viewing it. I also plan on stopping over at Caffeto for the Minnesota steemit video. Three of my favorite things, coffee, steemit and Minnesota all in one place! Should be fun. Keep up the great work. Cheers🍻
@timcliff, you are an inspiration to new members like me and a good reason why Steemit is great. I wrote an article yesterday about why steemit will take over socail media (mentioned you there too-pls check it out) and I believe that we will surely make it as top player in the social media segment due to hardworking folks like you who bring out time to help all members (including new minnow like me) succeed. Keep up the good work, bless you.
Nice, thanks :)
Welcome, more success.
Great news, always look forward to seeing posts from witness' like yourself. It's great the transparency that Steemit members get on here. Something fairly rare these days.
Much appreciated.