Explosion in Steem User On-Boarding
Perhaps one of the least acknowledged work that me and @timcliff do is the daily dealings with stuck accounts. It's voluntary work that I've tagged along with Tim when I started on Steem. It was a spontaneous act on my behalf at that time. I had joined the https://steemit.chat/channel/help channel and started answering random questions from newbies. Little by little, I got more involved in the process and my random Samaritan deeds turned into a bigger responsibility. The most asked questions were and are still related to the sign-ups. As many have experienced, an account application via Steemit.com can be delayed or rejected for various reasons: incomplete or multiple submissions, duplicate accounts etc... For a long time, Steemit has been reviewing and approving accounts manually to filter abuse (robots, spammers, scammers), but unfortunately legitimate users are also affected by the delayed process.
Things are slowly changing, as Steemit is implementing a new sign-up mechanism, as @pkattera and @sneak touched on that in this video (around 9:00-10:30) https://steemit.com/steemit/@ruwan/i-filmed-this-video-of-ned-pkattera-and-sneak-talking-about-the-smts-and-the-future-of-steemit. The new system is still being worked on, and the transition is not yet over. However, the experience should improve over the next 2-4 weeks, according to @sneak.
In the past, me and @timcliff used to process stuck accounts by asking some repetitive questions to the users. It was very tedious, especially with foreign users; pasting a long text to them often led to misunderstandings and wrong answers from their part, which stretched the discussions in order to get the correct answers! Then SteemFest 2 happened and that's when I personally felt the heat. In fact, during SteemFest 2, everyone was away, so I was left alone and helpless (no pun intended) in the #help channel addressing all the issues. When deliverance came, after SteemFest ended, I decided to put up a database system to deal with the increasing number of stuck queries. I won't go into the details of that so I don't give hints to abusers, but suffice to say things have improved from the screening point of view and are faster and tidier than before (Google translation added, to help with foreign languages). Also, it's easier now to keep track of the people we helped. Speaking of which, here are some statistics since I implemented the new system in November 2017. Before that, I have no figures because it was all manual screening, God knows how many users we processed in countless DM's!
| Month | Cases |
|---|---|
| Nov 2017 | 41 |
| Dec 2017 | 126 |
| Jan 2018 | 373 |
| Feb 2018 | 761 |
| TOTAL | 1301 |
When I look back, I can shout Holy Crap! Those are of course the users who came on the chat and asked for direct help. There are surely more than that stuck in the approval waiting list.
Steem Rising
The numbers are rising. I hope the sign-up transition would unfold quickly or March would be a hectic month. I joined in June 2017, my user ID is 191,643. Today, steem has created Id 776,800 and more. That's a whopping 4x increase in 8 months. Granted, some of those accounts are bots, but the demand is increasing as Steem gains more visibility on websites and forums.
Also, with the advent of HardFork 20, the on-boarding will experience more pressure. Hopefully the new sign-up system will cope with that.
Message To Newbies
When you join the #help channel, or refer your friends to it, please read the pinned messages BEFORE your start asking questions. There's a lot of information there regarding the sign-ups, alternative ways to create accounts and bandwidth problems. It would make things cleaner and easier for everybody if that simple step is followed. As I mentioned, the increase in stuck cases is increasing, and things are getting chaotic in the #help channel already. Please understand that we are volunteers trying to help you. Be patient, as we try to respond within 24 hours.
Also, I gathered most of the information related to sign-ups and put them on https://steemian.info/signup-faq. For me it's easier to paste a link than to tell users in DM's to read the pinned messages.
Where Are Those Pinned Messages?
Two clicks:
As you can see, we have two examples of users who haven't read the pinned messages... although it's clearly stated in the topic: DO NOT POST ANYTHING HERE before reading the pinned messages (in the top right corner menu). Multiply that tens of times daily and you'll get a sense of the unneeded flood of the same thing.
Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank everyone who has given some of their time to help in the channel, @pfunk, @gandalf, @sykochica, @guiltyparties, @julienbh. I may have missed a few, sorry about that.
I'd like to also invite everyone to participate in the help channel, it is public and open to all. People with skills (developers, witnesses) can surely help us cope with the increasing demand.
Thank you for reading and don't forget to support @drakos and @timcliff, your favorite witnesses 😊
Available & Reliable. I am your Witness. I want to represent You.
🗳 If you like what I do, consider voting for me 🗳
If you never voted before, I wrote a detailed guide about Voting for Witnesses.
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses. My name is listed in the Top 50. Click 
once.
Alternatively you can vote via SteemConnect
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=drakos&approve=1
Sounds like a heroic effort! Thanks for doing this.
I expect new arrivals to Steemit to accelerate int he coming years as the major social medial platforms ramp-up their policing and censorship efforts.
I hope you guys can deal with the incoming tsunami of new Steemians! :-)
Oh lord, a tsunami? I better start running lol
I had convinced a fellow mountaineer friend to join Steemit and share his experiences here. I helped him sign up. It has been over 10 days now and his account hasn't been approved yet. Could you please look into it? I had signed him up with the username @arjunvajpai
Any help would be very encouraging @timcliff
Ask him to come on the chat help channel.
Fair play to you guys for helping out. Especially with the new members. It is one thing about steemit that i just cant make sense of. Everything else these days is instantaneous but to join here will take 4-5 days. Not a great start for most people which is a shame as there is so much here once they join. I have plugged the site to many friends but have lost some due to the waiting time unfortunately.
Yes I was excited and impatient for my approval but it ensures a much higher quality of member. And steem is a long term relationship so a week is not long in context.
You can also use the paid account creation services. I believe they are more instant.
same here
Great work my friend. Yeah, i have been reading about this today and i totally support the idea. So many idle accounts after introductory posts have been made. It is costing the platform a lot and doing the manual verification is to help reduce it to the minimum and unfortunately and you have said, genuine users would be affected too. My cousin is one and he has been on it since two weeks now. He even tried using steeminvite, just heard it is temporarily down and being worked upon too and some are switching to v2 already. He lost his password to a crashed phone and didn't back his password up. He has resolved to opening a new one and that is now the reason he is having this challenge.
@drakos,
You ROCK!!!! I reached out to you after reading @hopehuggs's post here: https://steemit.com/help/@hopehuggs/njbyufvy. Within five minutes, you had gotten back to me with the form I needed to fill out, and here I am! I was so excited to get the email today telling me to confirm my account.
I sincerely hope folks understand how valuable you are to the community for the work that you do with stuck accounts (I can only imagine how much more value you offer overall).
I just wanted to pop in here to say how much I appreciate you!
Welcome aboard :)
You are my favorite witnesses indeed 😊 and thanks for all your voluntary efforts to make steemit work better for everyone.
I'm far from being able to help out with that help channel, but maybe someday.
Actually, I wrote a newbies getting started guide yesterday that you may want to share with folks. I honestly think it is way better than the approach people are asked to start with in the Welcome section. Don't know if you can pass that along to anyone who can do anything about it, but as a newbie writing for newbies, I've got to tell you that I think an approach more like this is what people really need when they get past the obstacles of getting an account in the first place.
Not to toot my own horn, because really all I did was wade through like 50 different "getting started" articles and then organize the information into the order things really need to be learned/done in, with concise explanations of each step. It's really top of the mind for me, because I'm new myself and having to sort through all this. So I did a sort of "getting started intensive" these last few weeks, and this guide is the synthesis of that.
I probably could have talked more about tags and delegated SP, but on the whole I think people who start with this little guide of mine will have a much better experience on this platform. If you have time to take a look and see if you can do anything to get it to more of the people who need it, that would be awesome.
Either way, thanks again for all you do. I hope to increasingly have the ability to contribute to this community myself.
I can vouch for her starting guide (not that my voice carries any weight here). I want to say upfront I don't know her, just came across her from someone else who resteemed her. I resteemed the post she is mentioning as well as I found it very knowledgeable. I have been studying this platform for 3 weeks now and she covered things I still hadn't come across in it. As someone new here I can say it was a huge benefit.
We are for the most part left to our own devices to figure this out, and posts like hers (I am sure there are probably hundreds or thousands just as good) are quickly scrolled away in the volume of new posts, lost to those coming on board unless it was indexed high by Google and the new user Googled the exact title.
Indigoocean, not sure if you will want to do this or not. In my Google searching I came across a Reddit thread for Steem. Maybe you could reach out to the moderators there and see if they would list it as a resource. I see many there who are asking all kinds of questions (especially why they are not getting approved in a timely manner as this post is about).
Thanks again for taking the time for your newbie guide. I have revisited Steem Supply so many times since reading it, and have never been so excited to see movement of such small increments, hahahaha.
Oh, thank you so much! I will follow your advice and see if I can get it listed there. I'd really like to see it listed on the suggested article on the Welcome page here. I think people need a sort of "quickstart guide" in addition to all the single topic articles out there. It can be overwhelming sorting through all that when you're new and figuring out what you need to focus on right now as opposed to a few weeks from now.
Thanks again for your kind words and suggestion.
@drakos Thank you for your assistance in getting my stalled account approval restarted and completed! I had been waiting for either 10 or 12 days since applying (I lost count lol) and I still hadn't had a confirm email, just a confirm code. Luckily I knew somebody (@hopehuggs) who pointed me to a post that she had written about this (https://steemit.com/help/@hopehuggs/njbyufvy) and she also recommended that I contact you.
It's a great community that has great people, and this is such a great community because it has such great people as you. I am amazed and humbled that you give up your time to do this. Thank you @drakos, for being the capable midwife at my Steemit birth! :-)
Welcome aboard, I hope you enjoy your experience :)
Thanks! I am already :-) It's all a bit overwhelming at first and then I started to get the hang of it.
I am just starting to realize the great help of many people in the platform and the significance of witnesses.
It took me a while to find out that chat is perhaps the ultimate option for someone in order to solve their problem. I contacted the help channel where @julienbh was there to assist almost immediately with her witty replies :) and regarding the other matter I needed assistance, you and @timcliff took time to resolve it so Thank You All so much!
It would be great if such a channel was also on discord and I must say that https://steemian.info is a great help which I plan to promote to my steemit friends.
p.s. Do you know that your name in Greek means "Dragon"?
Yes some Greek users pointed it out that I'm a dragon :)
Nice post
Thank you Mr Nice Meme :)
Thank you @drakos for your time and effort.
That upvote is very kind @drakos. It's magnitudes bigger than any I've received before. Thank you.