Anyx, Cheetah, and Steemcleaners: witness update -- 2017-06-14

Aboard a ferry, from Gibsons to Vancouver. Photo by me.

If I had a nickel for every time I said "been a while since my last update", I'd have.. well, a couple nickels. Yet, once again, it's true -- I've been a busy bee, in real life and on Steemit, so I figured an update was in order.

In real life, a lot has happened recently. Namely three big ticket things: I completed my qualifying exam at university to advance to a PhD candidate, I moved from Vancouver to the SF Bay area for an internship, and, of course, started that internship!

So what about Steemit? Well, I've been posting with some spare time (my Chicago series seemed to be quite popular!), and hit some cool milestones (>1600 followers, >1000 posts). But the real magic has been happening with everyone else around me: the serious price rise, and rise in user activity. (Which, surprise-surprise, is correlated, as many old friends started reaching out!)

So how about that activity rise? Big changes, and huge signups! Furion says over 1000%, and we had our first day of 10,000 posts in 24 hours.. Nuts. This update will thus be about how this has affected me as a witness!

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Steemcleaners

In response to this amazing rise, the Steemcleaners logs have also grown in size. New and old, the spammers, scammers and plagiarists are once again cropping up in all corners of the site. We even had to partition a daily log due to being too long.

@fubar-bdhr, a seriously un-sung-steemit-hero, has been our top Steemcleaner for months now. He seriously deserves some praise for the amount of effort he puts in to this. So go wish him a happy birthday today! :)

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Cheetah

Then I checked the API I'm using for Cheetah.. and..

oh god.

oh dear god.

Well, as you can imagine (another surprise-surprise) the posting rate is totally tied to how hard Cheetah has to work. With engagement up over 1000%, so was my bill.

In response to the crazy rise in activity, and cost, I accomplished a few things:

• Created the FAQ. As many people sign up and see Cheetah for the first time, it's important they have a place to get answers to the most commonly asked questions I hear.
• I optimized some of the algorithm, to favour fewer API calls. This incurred a slight penalty to catch accuracy, unfortunately, but was necessary.
• I started splicing and formatting the Cheetah logs I keep. I then built an automated posting service, which aggregates a daily log, and submits it. You can now follow @cheetah and check out everything she's done in a day, and should you choose, upvote her logs to support directly her (and me)!

While Cheetah has been a quiet kitty, dutifully performing for a year with over 20,000 comments, this recent rise in activity has forced me to seek an alternative funding method for her in the form of the logs. It took all of one day before I got my first person calling me a "reward pool rapist", so it may not be the best option. I genuinely am not interested in profiteering (I mean come on, I didn't post logs for a year, when I totally could have), so let me know in the comments below what you think of this new strategy.

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Hardfork 19

With linear rewards coming up, I am quite excited to see how much an impact this will have on newcomers. With the current price, even a minnow will have a tangible influence on rewards, and I can't wait to see the excitement that that will bring!

With the official date set to the 20th, I have set up a backup server on the newest release already, and will be swapping over my main soon.

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Other cool stuff!

Peerplays launched!

Check out some info about setting up, voting for witnesses, and claiming ICO funds here. If you haven't heard of Peerplays yet, now's a great time to go check out the project, while it's still in its infancy! Many awesome Steemians are already on board.

P.S.: I am also running a witness on Peerplays (same name -- @anyx. On my TO-DO list is a formal post declaring my offical witness proposal) I appreciate those who already vote for me there!

Steemfest 2 announced!

I couldn't be more excited for this! Last year I had a blast with all you fellow Steemians who made it to Amsterdam, and I can't wait to do it again in Lisbon. And a special shoutout to @roelandp for the amazing success in the first fest, and the @firepower crew: @sjennon @foxxycat @razvanelulmarin @anduweb, I can't wait to see you all again!

I'll be buying my tickets soon! :)