the last paragraph of this piece invites us to vote for Mark as a witness because he is, "transparent, ethical and ..... competent", to this end the rules of this service should be made clearer and a lot more visible because a lot of people a losing money because they made one "error" or the other (no refunds you see ;) ), there are similiar bots offering silimiar service and if you do not meet criteria with these bots your funds would simply bounce back.
In the spirit of being "transparent, ethical and competent" the service should automatically refund when a bid is invalid, there are several bots offering the same sort of service and they mostly either automatically refund if you do not meet criteria or they issue a manual refund once you contact them ( please see proof here, several bots automatically refund invalid bids including jerrybanfield's bot: https://s3.amazonaws.com/yabapmatt/bottracker/bottracker.html#free).
I would suggest that the people behind this service temporarily suspend the service until they are able to figure out how refunds can be issued.
Keeping people's money without providing the service that they are paying for is completely unacceptable and should not be the case especially in the spirit of "transperancy, ethics and competence"
There are several that do not. Many like Jerry don't pay rent for their Steem Power.
The reason is stated in our refund policy post because the bot tracker doesn't account for refunds and frequently has errors causing users to bid less. Because I have to pay 40,000 STEEM/month for rent, I have to make a minimum amount to keep the service running. When people bid and it would result in a refund, the money comes out of what we would use to pay rent. Many windows would make less than what is required to make rent, refunds made it more so the case. All the 500+ refunds I issued manually were user errors and not something on our end.
It wasn't a policy I wanted to do, it was a direct result of 99% of people using the bot tracker tool and adjusting their bids based on money sent, regardless if it is a valid post or not. We already took a hit of 50% from when the bot tracker went live.
You may not agree with the policy and are upset you lost 1 SBD because you bid on a post that was past the point that Steem allows us to vote, that does not mean I am not transparent, honest, and ethical. I am one of the few bots with 100% uptime for 4 months of being around, do not sell votes privately, bid on my own posts, or use the voting power outside of the bid windows. I also have a lot of added value no other bot offers with the curation digest, prevote club, and author of the day that costs me time and money with no financial reward.
I am sorry you are unhappy, and I completely understand your frustration. This is not one of our rules, Steem just does not allow posts past 6 days 12 hours, there is nothing we can do about it, and we are very clear about not offering refunds. We always offered refunds until a tool out of our control started to have more control over our business than I do.
Mark, i am not accusing you directly, you have taken the time to respond to me both privately and here, i am not casting aspersion directly at you apologies if it comes across that way, i was mainly commenting on the system, it is clearly flawed, people make mistakes and people will expect a refund and if they dont get one they will have a go at you, this will happen ... good luck anyway ... hope you have a tin hat though! ... lol :)