Stalk Your Stalkers with GINAbot, the Steem Notifications Bot for Discord Users

Steemians are no exception to the behavior most beginning bloggers suffer from. Usually, both want to know about their statistics and the popularity of their content.

For traditional bloggers that usually means an Analytics obsession, combined with a constant never-satisfied hunger for Likes, Retweets, and Shares. For Steemians, most often, it is much simpler to follow and everything is about upvotes. Because upvotes tend to equate moniezzz.

With Steem still being in a very early stage and so far not one platform has created any of the privacy violating tools features like for example WordPress.com has, keeping track of everything is often quite difficult a task. Combine with that the noise generated by spammy automated posts daily report posts with hundreds of @mentions in each post and it all quickly becomes a hassle to follow.

An ego-stroking hassle for many but a hassle nevertheless.

Because Internet active and thriving Internet communities do what they do, it was only a matter of time until somebody created a better notification system than the one currently available to Steemians and on most platforms.

With Steemit not having launched its mobile app yet, which is expected before the end of the year (for iOS), Steemian @neander-squirrel (which may very well be one of the best ever nicknames available) has decided to take matters in his hands and has created the first publicly available and properly working notifications system for Steem.

GINAbot, the Steem Notifications System for Discord Users

GINAbot, or General Instant Notification Automaton, is a free notifications system for users of the popular Discord app, which also hosts many Steem communities. Or cliques as certain witnesses would say.

The bot can notifiy anyone of the most popular account actions on Steem as well as notify users when another user has posted a new update. A perfect way to stalk your stalkers.

The most popular available notifications are:

• Upvotes
• Comments
• Comment replies
• Resteems
• New post (by self or by another Steemian)
• New post in a specific tag
• Follows
• Unfollows
• Mentions
• Witness votes

Currently GINA can also notify about incoming and outgoing wallet transfers, but not yet or when rewards are available to be claimed. Head over to the bot’s announcement post to discover which other notifications can also be received.

Where GINA truly excels is in the configuration options, as well as in the amount of details shown for with each notification. GINA does not only update about the action but also provides info about the user performing the action or the value of upvotes. When you get a new follower, or an follow, GINA will update with details about the account’s age, reputation, and Steem Power.

Upvote notifications show the Voting Power spent for each upvote as well as the amount of rewards earned from that upvote and the current running total of rewards for the post or comment which was just upvoted as can be seen in the screenshot.

All notifications can be received for multiple accounts one operates, or has wallet access to. One merely needs to register an account in GINA’s discord server and subsequently verify the account by sending a little amount of SBD to GINA, which is returned within seconds after verification. The latter to avoid that multiple people, also non-account holders and possibly even Discord bots, would follow an account and receive all details which could quickly clogs GINA’s server.

Another great feature of GINA is that users can chose which is their preferred interface to be sent to when clicking a link from a notification. Currently users can chose between steemit.com, steemitstage.com, busy.org, and beta.chainbb.com.

All links are redirected via the bot’s server. When asked about this @neander-squirrel mentioned tha the doesn’t actively track for analytics or to collact profiles and has no plans to do such either. The sole reason for the redirect via the minnow-power.net domain is in order to track account activity. Users who haven’t clicked a link for several days may at some point become deactivate, that in order to minimise the amount of accounts GINA actively needs to track, and thus also the serverload.

Plans to open source GINA after an extended period of operating the bot with many users exist, @neander-squirrel told us.

We have been using GINA for several days now and we must admit that, while we aren’t dopamine-driven, GINA’s notifications are nice. And especially very fast.

While personally we don’t think bots should be gender neutral, in order to further combat objectification of gender, we have very little~~ nothing negative to say about GINA and think the bot is an excellent addition to the Steem ecosystem.

Both an excellent and currently a much needed addition. The fact that currently the notification come is DIscord didn’t bother us, because we are active in multiple online communities which use Discord. For some non-Discord users this may be a hindrance but shouldn’t be. Discord is free and is required to register with GINA.

Discord also has an excellent mobile app, although we recommend users to tweak their notification settings. When Steem goes mainstream in a near future, popular Steemians receiving notifications via GINA may soon suffer of notifications overload.

Which could look like this.

Follow @ginabot or head over to GINA’s Minnow-Power Discord server to register and trial the free notifications system.