TimCliff Witness Update 2017-10-21

Hello Everyone!

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

• A lot of my time has been spent helping the users in the "help" channel of steemit.chat. I make sure to login at least once a day every day and go through every support issue, to ensure that everyone in the channel requesting help gets a response within 24 hours. Thanks also to @drakos and @pfunk for helping too!
• I continue to post the weekly Reports from the Witnesses series each week, which provides the community with an aggregated report of all the witness reports from the past week.
• I created a post Steps for setting up a witness node (the manual way) as a guide for new witnesses looking to setup a witness node.
• I have been trying to start a new #discussion tag to encourage more posts that create lively and engaging discussions. You can read about it here: Hey Steemains - Let's start a #discussion!
• I was a guest on the mspwaves show hosted by @sircork. The interview was a ton of fun! You can listen to the recording of the show here.
• I created a post to warn users to save their posts before submitting due to the issues that the website has been having with lost posts.
• I submitted a condenser pull request to update FAQ content to clarify the stolen account recovery process.
• I submitted a pull request to condenser to warn users of spam/phishing links in their wallet memos.
  
• I submitted a pull request to condenser to update the links that new users see when they view their blog page before it has any posts.

Some Information / Suggestions:

• Remember to save your posts in a text editor before submitting, in case it fails to successfully submit!
• In case you haven't heard about it yet, Steemit announced a new project called SMTs. This is very exciting and will likely attract a lot of new big players to the Steem economy. To see a preview for how SMTs might change things, check out this post from @donkeypong.

Forward Looking Plans:

• Continue to provide support in the help channel of steemit.chat.
• Continue with the weekly "Reports of the Witnesses" series.
• I will be heading to #steemfest in about a week! My spouse ( @artist1989 ) and I will be stopping in Germany for a few days before the conference to visit his birth mom. It is our first trip outside the US, and we are both very excited =) We look forward to meeting a lot of you in Lisbon!

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: Currently the peg seems to be mostly holding close to $1 USD (hovering between $0.95 and $1.05), which is where we want it. There have been some short-term fluctuations outside that range, but they have not lasted for an extended period of time. I continue to have a small amount of interest (1%) to try and help with the occasional dips below $1.
• Price Discount: Currently the debt level is at 1.5%, and SBD is pegged close to $1 USD. 1.5% is starting to get slightly high, but is still less than 2%. Based on this, I see no need for a price feed discount at this time.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee is currently set to 0.2 STEEM. This makes it so that a new account costs 6 STEEM (non-delegated), which is about $5.60 USD at current market prices.
• Maximum Block Size: I currently have my block size set to 65,536. There seem to be no issues related to bandwidth after the 19.1 soft-fork, so I am comfortable with the consensus on this parameter given the current system use.

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!