Merge Rewards (BETA)
Go to:
merge-rewards.com
merge-rewards.com
Website and Bot
Earn money with your Pull Requests on GitHub!
Merge Rewards is a fully automated service that lets you earn STEEM and other Cryptocurrencies with your merged pull requests on GitHub.
Connect your GitHub account and claim your rewards by simply clicking a button.
If you haven't: read the introduction post.
Development Update
There are two major changes since the announcement post: 35+ commits, starting from here and here.
Seamless Onboarding
Getting people to create their own Steem account (and even pay for it if they don't want to wait) just to use your service is an annoyingly difficult task. So Merge Rewards goes another way. All you need is your GitHub account and I assume that among the target audience of this project most people have one.
The rewards are generated with the @merge-rewards account while your personal balance is recorded. You can then withdraw your funds in theoretically any Cryptocurrency that the blocktrades API supports. Currently only Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Monero and of course Steem are implemented but I will add more if there is demand for it.
Of course having a Steem account comes with benefits. The whole generated reward goes to you! GitHub-only users get only the liquid STEEM/SBD payout but not the Steem Power.
Better Website
I worked on a first version of the website. This first prototype was really just a proof-of-concept thing. Now it looks like something. Far from final but at least there's some explanation now and something you could call a "design" or whatever. It even has a logo now! Even though the symbol is actually a fork and not a merge but well... I'll fix that at some point for sure but not now. :P
What's next?
Some ideas I already shared in the introduction post. Here are two new ones:
Account Creation
Since people can start generating rewards immediately, without a Steem account, using these rewards to create one for them once they successfully tried the service a few times... seems to be a logical next step. Keep in mind that rewards are higher when connected to a Steem account so there is actually an incentive on having one.
Bounties
To not rely entirely on Steem Power delegations it would be nice to offer a way for project owners and others to set bounties on open issues. With the help of blocktrades I could implement an option on the website to send any of the supported cryptocurrencies to the @merge-rewards account to attach it to an issue. When a GitHub user claims his rewards for the pull request with which he closed the issue, the bounty could be released at the same time. For GitHub-only users the bounty would be added to their balance and Steem users would simply receive it directly on their Steem account.
A bot could comment on the issue on GitHub, letting people know about the bounty.
Reducing Technical Debt
So far my development approach was "making it work asap". That's why there are some critical issues that need to be fixed soon.
Resource Credits
Currently, especially with this small amount of SP, the @merge-rewards account could easily reach it's RC limits. There is nothing implemented so far to deal with that. Claiming/Voting would simply fail without any notice in the UI.
The voting bot works anyway but it would be nice to predict duration until next vote and so on, to display it in the UI.
Database
I wasn't sure about the right database solution for this project and I didn't want to spend time in the beginning on settings things up. So I decided to store data in simple json files. Since I'm not so sure about the scalability of this approach this needs to be migrated to a real database. Either mongodb or maybe a relational database like postgres.
Delegate!
Obviously this whole thing can only work with a considerable amount of STEEM POWER. I really think that the idea is absolutely valid and the current implementation shows that I'm serious about making it work.
This post is again set to 100% SP payout (Well... I just realized that I forgot to do that. Now I can't change it anymore but I will power up everything I get. :D) but a direct delegation is of course the most needed way of support. Unfortunately using the service currently doesn't mean much more than testing it because there aren't really any rewards. If you are able to change that... you're very welcome!
I really hope I don't need to implement any mechanics for rewarding delegators because I would rather spend my time on other improvements.
Disclaimer
I still consider this to be a PROTOTYPE! Please see this as a project that we can develop together and so far there hasn't been any other testing then my own so... bare with me please. If there is some bug preventing you from getting your rewards, fix it and get rewarded for that! If you think the scoring algorithm is too stupid just submit a PR or let's discuss. If you have any other features in mind let me know.
Wow, that's a great update UI wise. It looks way more better, at the moment. :) This is really shaping up well, good luck!
On a side/minor note, can't we stop the loop if we found the vote after that line?
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Well... If you can do some performance benchmarks to convince me that it's worth the extra line of code... :P
But you're right, good catch. Thanks for actually reading the code. :D
Thank you for your review, @emrebeyler! Keep up the good work!
Oh, I missed introduction of this project.
Re: own token. It's also about a distribution. With SP you are entangled with all SP properties including price and distribution. Having your own token, you can delegate significant amounts to curators to upvote relevant content, rewarding it accordingly to its specific, even if some highly staked SP holder will try to abuse it by upvotes or troll with downvotes.
I don't know if I can really full envision the benefits of that but I expected it to be something like that. I need to think a little bit more about this. If you have a practical example for how it would make sense for merge-rewards, that would save me a lot of thinking.... :P
Would be interesting to hear your opinion about the project in general.
Unfortunately, no idea about the optimal use case. Maybe Utopian or Steem Engine guys can help with ideas?
Well, I think I'm totally fine with Steem for now. :D
At least there are more important things to do first. I just migrated to an actual database and I need to implement some calculations regarding resource credits. Aaaand there are so many features to develop. Own token must wait.
Hi fellow utopian! Please reconsider your TAG selection. According to https://join.utopian.io/guidelines/ this should not be tagged "developement". Your post is mostly about "Promotion" or "Ideas", or maaaaybe a "development log" due to that brief paragraph about "new unfinished website design", so probably it should be categorized as Ideas/Suggestions or Blog. Not 'development' tag. This one has quite clear guidelines.
Well, but there was a lot of development. Shall I link all the 30+ commits? Basically everything since the last post, which was accepted without any complains by the way. You mention the "new unfinished website design" but actually most work lies in the paragraph "Seamless Onboarding". I don't really understand why I should categorize this as "Ideas/Suggestions". Blog might be suitable but actually it makes me a little bit frustrated that I always need to do so much extra work to get rewarded for my development work. Actually that's one of the central points behind Merge Rewards. Anyway... maybe you can discuss this with your moderator collueges, like @helo for @emrebeyler. For me it's just really important to gather some Steem Power for the project. That's why I publish them with the @merge-rewards account and not my own and the Utopian Upvote would be really appreciated as long as there are no big delegators.
Hey! Thanks for response.
Actually I'm not a moderator :) Reviews from them are always formalized, have link to the scoresheet, and so on. I just sometimes go over current utopian-io activity to see what's going on, and sometimes I just feel like leaving a note when something feels odd (like recently, for example, https://steemit.com/promari/@promari/programming-news-qiita-july-15-2019-vol-1#@ookamisuuhaisha/pure8t - you have to admit it's ODD at the least).
You're right. I must have been tired, now I reread your post and it doesn't sound like that. I think I was fooled by the "Here are two new ones:" in the middle of the post, and reading further I probably didn't notice that "Reducing Technical Debt" is a separate paragraph, and I took it as another point under "two more ideas". Sorry about that.
Regarding "linking to 30 commits", I get your point. I actually did something like that not long ago, closely following the guidelines, but .. I got scolded by the reviewers for getting into too much detail and producing too complex post. Well.. clearly the guidelines are not ideal then. However, I still think that for 'development' category, you should summarize the changes/features/etc. You've said now in your reply that
I understand that now, but when I was reading your post, it was totally not clear! Nowhere in the text is any mention that you have just implemented that "Seamless Onboarding"! While reading this post, I was 100% sure that the "Onboarding" paragraph is just you promoting one of the main features of your project -- and that would exactly be the "Blog" category :) -- and that's why I thought that the actual work was on the "website desing" part.
If I were closely tracking your project, I'd probably get it that "Seamless Onboarding" is new feature, since previously it wasn't seamless, but .. for me as a random reader from the internet, it totally wasn't clear from the text of the post. Seriously, even changing the paragraph title to, for example, "New feature: Seamless Onboarding", or "Seamless Onboarding is now fully functional" would do the trick :)
Thanks for your genuine approach to help contributors with their posts! I like that! And yes, I will add another heading... Maybe Updates: ...
:D
Edit: Ok, updated the post. Should be more clear now. Thanks again for your feedback!
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This sounds very interesting, good project!
Thank you! :)
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