Beware Inactive Witnesses - Witness Stats Released
Introducing Witness Stats
Brought to you by STEEM Liberator - @netuoso (vote me as witness)
The cause
Your witness votes are very important, and you can only give so many (30). It is necessary that a witness has a reliable setup that is always available to be a worthwhile witness. Unfortunately, people often forget to check up on the witnesses they vote for. This leaves behind many stale votes for underperforming, or even disabled, witnesses.
Currently disabled witnesses in the Top 100
STEEMIANS, THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!
These votes could be going to witnesses that are still active, involved, and updated! Just look how many disabled witnesses are sitting in the Top 100 ... while I am in position 102 and very active.
Call to Action
Please visit the Witness Stats website and input your name into the field and hit enter. This will return the witnesses that you currently vote for, along with some other statistics. See below for an example from my account:
Notice how all of my voted witnesses are green, publishing feed prices, and not missing a crazy amount of blocks. Your list should look the same. However, if you find a bad offender, you can click their name to UNVOTE their witness. See below for example:
(this is an example, dont unvote @aggroed)
Vote for new witnesses via the website
On top of being able to unvote witnesses you already vote, there is a section to allow you to vote for a new witness. That looks like:
Last but not least
Of course, you can view the top 200 witnesses by visiting the "Witness List" page. You will still be able to see color coded statistics about these users.
Questions, comments, and suggestions
I made this for the entire community. Please leave comments and suggestions below if you have any. Maybe some tips of how to improve the interface, what stats to track, what new features to add, etc.
Roadmap
Going forward, I plan to add browser notifications to the website and allow users to create accounts.
This will greatly improve the ease of voting/unvoting for witnesses as well as allowing users to stay up-to-date about how their voted witnesses are performing.
I will be adding an API to the website, and adding the ability to get useful witness stats to my STEEM API Ruby gem
I will also be making a new post about once a week detailing the changing status of the Top 100
Vote for @netuoso as Witness
- Go to the witness voting page on SteemIt.com
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the vote box (shown below)
- Input my name (netuoso) and hit vote.
- Give yourself a high-five for making such an awesome decision
PSST
If you need suggestions on good witnesses to vote for, check out the MinnowSupport Witness list
Important Disclaimer
You should be wary of putting your private keys on any website, including mine.Things can happen even when people take every possible precaution. You can easily use my site to get information then go to the SteemIt witness voting page to ensure the utmost security until a proper OAuth login method has been created with SteemIt. If you decide to trust me, I am not responsible for any lost keys, but if something does happen I will be aware of it and release a warning urging everyone to change their keys.
I'm going to echo what @netuoso said...
STEEMIANS, THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE
If you are still voting for inactive witnesses you are wasting your votes! There are plenty of good valuable witnesses in need (auto corrected to Ned 😂 ) of your vote! We should see 0 inactive witnesses in the top 100. Even if you don't vote for me or @netuoso at least vote for active witnesses!! Just saying...
Great tools , hopefully users will utilize them and not only cast their votes but do them with confidence.
How to become a Witness? Curious to know.
@Yehey
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@netuoso/the-concise-steem-witness-guide-for-ubuntu-16-july-2017
https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19
It can be fairly technical.
Ask the @helpbot ;)
What's the downside of the out-of-date witnesses? Inactive is pretty self-explanatory. That list has a ton of red and grey.
Well, for one, 0.19.1 contains a fix to a major bug that was causing the bandwidth issues.
So being out-of-date carries a number of possible implications.
A witness should be able to "vote" on a hardfork version. But a minor fix version should be implemented ASAP.
Perfect. That answer has more authority from you than it does from me.
Nom Nom nommity nomm noms.
I made a post saying this exact thing. Love your contributions and ethics @blueorgy!
I just posted a new episode of ~(~Q2C2~)~ and featured your project in hopes to advertise it and bring in more sup
You can check it out here here if you like.
Big thank you!
You know what bud, you will be my second witness vote. You at the very least care more than those on the top 100 inactive witness list :)
Hi netuoso - you can answer this too, but I am doing a test to try this bot. I really do what to know the answer. Also - voted for you :)
@helpbot What criteria should I use when choosing which witnesses to vote for?
They should be on the latest version of the stable Steemd.
They should not be disabled.
They should have minimal missed blocks.
They should be publishing a price feed.
Those are really the only major qualifiers to look for without historical data. In the future, I am going to add charting and past information so a user can make a better informed decision.
PS: Disabling a witness is not bad, if it remains disabled for a long time that is bad.
Great response to the question , defiantly a keeper for future helpbot replies 😎
Maybe we can reward each other with shared witness support ;)
😎 Sounds good to me.
Thank you! How would I know if they have missed blocks?
Would they disable if they go on vacation or for another reason?
I have only voted for three and only because they mentioned it in their posts - not the best reason, but I figure I would be glad if someone voted for me, so I did it. I look forward to your next posts on it. Thank you.
They might disable for many reasons. Like updating. But if they remain disabled for days it is unacceptable.
Missed blocks for witnesses are visible on steemd.com and the witness stats page
Ok - thank you for your help :)
What happens if a witness runs the 0.19.0 rather than 0.19.1 ? Could there be any acceptable reason to do so?
I personally don't see an acceptable reason for it and will start removing witnesses that fail to update in a week or so.
Thank you. I've made the decission to notify and unvote all witnesses that run older versions until I at least get an answer from them.
In many cases of lower ranked witnesses (like myself), the update won't actually reflect until they get the next block (to signal back to the network).
I have updated to 0.19.1, but until I get my next block it won't reflect this unfortunately.
What criteria should I use when choosing which witnesses to vote for?
I am still learning and have no automatic response to your inquiry yet.
This question has been added to the @helpbot comment trail.
If you happen to know the answer to this question reply to this comment with it.
FYI Correct & accruate answers are rewarded! ;)
Learn more about the helpbot...
They should be on the latest version of the stable Steemd.
They should not be disabled.
They should have minimal missed blocks.
They should be publishing a price feed.
Those are really the only major qualifiers to look for without historical data. In the future, I am going to add charting and past information so a user can make a better informed decision.
PS: Disabling a witness is not bad, if it remains disabled for a long time that is bad.
@netuoso
Great use of the helpbot!
Thank you so much. I am so excited to find you. I think you need to give me a limit of how many questions per day - I have been here almost one month and I have 873 questions so far. I am so excited to spread them far and wide for you but I do not want to flood the system :)
Support the witnesses that support YOU!.
This is redundant functionality to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and soliciting/encouraging people to enter their Steem account active key on any other website is not a good idea.
It erodes the notion that it should be treated very securely, and only on services that have something massive to lose if they breach user trust. Steemit Inc has a vested interest in not breaching user account security, therefore they are far less likely to misuse/store auth keys.
This doesn't really make sense to me nor do I agree.
I'm a programmer with a background in security. I'm not some kid playing around with a keyboard here.
You are essentially saying SteemIt == Steem but that is very wrong. eSteem is an app where you can make transfers. This requires active key. Did you go tell them how bad an idea of their app (that I'm currently using) is?
STEEM connect allows people to delegate via a web interface using their active private key. Should we just tell people to use the cli_wallet because it is safer? What is safer?
The witness voting experience on SteemIt looks like something I made in 5 minutes while on vacation.
Thanks for your input but I also know that I am vested in STEEM and have been building a reputation here based on my real life identity. Basically saying that I'm not to be trusted is ridiculous bro. All of my code is open source once I deem it to be generalized enough to be released.
Also if SteemIt really cared that much about security and preventing users from putting their key on another site, they would have made a OpenAuth plugin to use the SteemIt website as login.
PS: you have 8 witnesses that didn't update to 0.19.0 and 2 of those are actually disabled. You could see that on my website and then go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
I'm not saying you're not trustworthy, it's that there are degrees of trust. I'm not saying Steemit is Steem, but as far as how deep they are invested in maintaining trust of Steem users, they are the deepest.
I agree the witness voting page isn't great. If you want to fix it up, you could submit a pull request to the Condenser repo.
Witnesses updating to 0.19.1 is not mandatory. One of the two witnesses you mention voluntarily disabled their witness account temporarily only an hour ago, and the other one I am still consciously voting for to leave the door open for them to come back and run a node again. Any other critiques? :P
Lol I just figured it would be nice to inform you in case you didn't know. But you are an active witness, not the problem with the network like some of these other guys.
I will definitely look into submitting a PR on the repo for improving the witness page. I have very little knowledge in react, however.
I appreciate you bringing your concerns to light though. Staying involved and communicating with others is necessary for a network like this to thrive.
See the disclaimer I added to the bottom of the post.
What could be a reason for keeping the old 0.19.0?
There's no real reason to keep the old except not wanting to take the time to upgrade to 0.19.1
Very informative
This post received a 2.1% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @ehujra! For more information, click here!
Thanks
GREAT article! Upvoted, resteemed, followed you, and voted for your witness!
I had a couple inactives, and a couple that aren't updated to 0.19.1 yet as well. Being a witness requires being on top of these things, thanks for the reminder! I'm currently sitting at 124 but am active and now updated to the latest version.
Don't wast votes when you have people like me paying mostly out of pocket to support the network!
Cleared my list, only two bad apples.
Gave you my witness vote.
Cheers ;)
Hey, thanks for the vote!
As a side note, my witness is updated but it won't reflect until my next block. :)
You have my vote. Let me do that now :)