First I met with @surfyogi on steemit, I really like his blog. He is a whale on steemit, but he does not want to rape the reward pull. He wanted to a build communities. He told me about his vision of @artzone and I thought it was more than a brilliant idea. That is why I started to use my IT skills to implement the features that we brainstormed about with @surfyogi.

In this post I will write down the technical challenges that I had to face during the creation of the @artzone bot.

The ingredients for a community bot:

• virtual machine
• Steem acount
• lots of SP
• an IT guy who maintains the system

Rules of artzone:

If you want to get upvotes from @artzone, you have to follow these rules:

• have #artzone tag in the post
• follow @artzone
• post body length should be greater than 300 characters
• have at least one link in the post
• @artzone can give just one upvote per day
• original artwork

Challenges:

• Finding the posts to upvote:
  Although there is an API to find posts with specific tags, unfortunately it did not find all the posts. Therefore the bot uses web-scraping tools to find the posts that have the #artzone tag. The posts can be found on the following link: https://steemit.com/created/artzone
• Growing the community:
  I think it is a huge success, in a few weeks only @artzone reached 4k followers, and it supported hundreds of artists.
  The block transaction was a big help in this, and so were the posts commented with #art but without #artzone tag. (We made this just on the first week)
• Finding curators to check the posts manually, comment them and identify the winners. @surfyogi did an amazing work.
• Calculating the vote value:
  The bot votes in every hour. The SP can recover after a 100% upvote in 144 minutes.
  So if the voting SP is 100%, in every hour the bot can give out around 41% upvote. This is the number which is divided by the number of posts to upvote in each hour. This determines the vote value.

I have uploaded all the code into the following github repositories, if you are interested in the details:
https://github.com/misrori/artzone_on_steemit

I hope my code can be an example to many other communities to start.

Future of @artzone

We experience a huge and rapid grow that we did not expected at the beginning. So latter on, if we still want to give value to the artist, we need to find more SP for the bot in order to keep pace with the huge demand.