SteemPlus 2.13: A big refractor to boost performance

in #utopian-io6 years ago (edited)

This new release doesn't add any new feature to your Steem experience.
Do not be disappointed though! We have kept a crazy developing pace for a few months, and with 28 different features to this day, SteemPlus has become quite a big extension. Recently, we have noticed that these many features were starting to have an impact on the performance and that it would make Steemit sluggish or even freeze at some points.
We cannot prefer quantity over quality, and hence decided to allocate some time to make a huge refractor in order to resolve those issues and clean the code.
Read on to see some of the things we did in more details. You can also find the list of features and installation procedures at the end of this post.

SteemPlus code changes

We've refractored every single js file in SteemPlus to apply the following changes:

  • Every feature is now bound to start only for certain urls. For this, we used regular expressions (regex) and checked if those regex were matched by the current url on Steemit (or Busy when applicable). Some features (such as the Steem Sincerity plugin) need to be loaded on many different pages so it took us a while to test every case.

  • Once this regex is matched, we need to find (using jquery) the element of Steemit or Busy that we want to modify. Since the speed at which the page loads depends on the user's Internet speed, we had to loop the function checking for these elements. However, in certain cases, Steemit can fail to load the elements and algorithm would keep looping forever. Not good! We've added a maximum number of retries to make sure it doesn't happen!

Applying these two changes to all the 30 javascript files was time-consuming but worth it: no more evidence of sluggishness caused by the extension could be found on our end.
We were let with a last problem: the interface seemed to periodically freeze and it was caused by an old piece of code that we had poorly coded a while ago. The calls for the Bittrex API to get the STEEM and SBD prices were originally done once when the page was loading. We made blocking calls to this API ( stops everything until the results arrived) by mistake and didn't realize it at that time since the function was called once only. We recently updated this function to run every minute, hence causing these freezes. We changed it to an asynchronous call to this API and couldn't reproduce this problem ever since.

We hope you will appreciate these performance upgrades on your extension and will stay tuned for the next things we ve got coming for you ;)

Coming soon

  • User statistics
  • Some Android stuff, we ll come to it ;)

Repository, Pull requests and Commits

Wanna contribute?

Join us on Discord

List of features

The complete list of feature and their description can be found in the documentation.

Available on Steemit and Busy
  • Voting slider for minnows (you do not need to vote at 100% anymore!)
  • True value of your account on your wallet (calculated with current SBD and STEEM market prices)
  • Delegation button in your wallet (with list of delegatees and undelegate button)
  • One click switch between Steemit , Busy, Utopian and Steemd
Available on Steemit (and mspsteem)
  • Feed+ : Filter your feed by tags, resteems (hide, show, blacklist, whitelist), reputation and sort it by upvotes/date/payout
  • STEEM/USD and SBD/USD values in the user dropdown
  • Option to add beneficiaries to your post (you can say that 10% of your post payout will go to one of your friends for example) - 5% fee goes to SteemPlus if you use this feature.
  • Cool badges on user profiles show their rank: Plankton, Minnow, Dolphin, Orca and Whales
  • Direct transfer to users
  • Favorites
  • Steem Sincerity
  • All Steemit More Info features
  • Steemit Board Awards
  • Witness information
  • Enhanced wallet
  • Rewards Information

Installation procedures

You can download and install SteemPlus directly from the Chrome Store if you are using Chrome (follow this link ).
For installation procedures on Opera and Firefox, please check our documentation.

Big shoutout to @jerrybanfield and his budgets project that allow us the speed up the development of SteemPlus!

@stoodkev and @cedricguillas for @steem-plus

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loving this, this will make ride more smooth on steemit , smt is going to blow up the market

I know right :)I mean sure you can upvote this comment too if it helps

i love using #steem-plus addons on my browser.
It make me easier to observe my activity and others.
Waiting for the android version.

Glad you like it! The Android version will take time but it s part of our plans! =)

It will be worth waiting for of this is anything to go by .....but please..quickly lol ;-)

wouldn't you be more transparent if you noted that use of the beneficiary feature also sends 5% to you rather than people needing to find the github for that detail? or discovering it in their payout when you show up as a beneficiary

btw, least you misunderstand, the steemplus extension is aweseome and I don't begrudge the 5%, it just shouldn't arrive as a surprise when using the feature.

You re right, I ll add it in the post. I just didnt want to copy the whole documentation in here, but this point makes sense.

Great work folks. I really appreciate the many useful features you have packed into SteemPlus! Thank you!!!! 100% upvote for you!

Thank you @terrybrock! Would you consider voting me as a witness to support the project?

Yes, tell me more. I don't know you.

Hi! Besides being the creator of SteemPlus, I have worked on several Steem related projects such as Utopian-1UP, a hivelike curation project for Utopian; I contributed to the first iterations of Utopian bot; developped AgX project for aggroed and will soon be helping to develop new tools for the Minnow Support Project.

I pledged to spend my time developing the tools that the community needs, not the one that would bring me easy money such as bid bots.

Finally, in terms of hardware, I have a 128 GB RAM server that is way more than enough for running a witness.

You can contact me on Discord or Steem.chat if you have any question

This is great. Day by day improve. Keep it up @steem-plus

I had been noticing the sluggishness and freezing, so this sounds like a most welcome update.

Thank you for all your continued work on this.

Will it update automatically, or do I need to do any sort of manual update process?

Loving Steem Plus! ^_^ Extra's are great!

Great update as I was having to do quite a few refreshes to get it work especially as I am still on a 3mb download connection! Awesome work as always!

I like to using #steem-plus addons. this is awsome addons which is so helpful for using steemit. i am using it in my browser.

Please tell me this is all true?
I have to try steem-plus then. I can't wait to see my voting power before casting votes. It has been quite a burden to me here on steemit.

Wow...this sounds nice. I think i have to give it a tria. If satisfied by it, i would let my friends know about it to. It was thoughtful of you guys to add those new feautures

The updates have been wonderful. @steem-plus is working much better on my browsers since the last 2 builds, actually.

So much appreciated!

Good stuff. I'd noticed my Steemit page hanging at times. I hope these changes will fix that. Thanks again

This is brilliant. The answer to my dreams so far lol...how come Id never heard about it before ? I also noticed a lot of other steam related apps in the chromestore to play with. Cheers for this. Loving it thus far :-)
PS Any chance of a link to steemsupply too please ? :-)

Oh wow I love this new feature of steemit! Great job :D
yourpostisamasterpiece.gif

am gonna enjoy using this cos i just got my pc fix, time to steem more

I love using add-ons # esteem-plus in my browser are fantastic very good post congratulations friend good job thank you

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This is definitely a great project to help user experience on the platform, installing the extension now!

Being new to Steemit and still learning, I'm looking forward to what you will be able to achieve with tge add-ons you are progressing toward and loving the platform so far.

SAludos, buena informacion. muy oportuna. gracias por publicar.

Hey @stoodkev, I just used the beneficiaries feature of steem-plus and @steem-plus has been added automatically as a 5% beneficiary. While I appreciate your work, I did not agree to this and believe that something like this should be communicated clearly before posting.

It s in the README, and written in this post.

It is not in the Chrome Store Description nor are there any terms and conditions that I needed to read & accept when I started using the steem-plus (which would be a legal requirement for something like beneficiary rewards I think?) and as an end user I usually don't search for the Github repo and read the README there.

Maybe consider informing about this when someone uses the beneficiary feature, e.g. in form of visibly adding a non-editable 5% beneficiary alongside the other beneficiaries.

I find that beneficiary rewards are not communicated clearly enough by most Steem projects (busy referral, Steepshot, Dtube) and many people don't even know about them, many even buy upvotes for posts with beneficiaries set and end up losing money due to this. When I was new on Steemit, I was buying small votes for my Steepshot posts without knowing about beneficiary rewards and only found out about them when I researched why my payouts were lower than expected..

Steem-plus is an open source project that already gets a lot of funding from budgets and utopian, but my problem is not that you are using beneficiary rewards, my problem is that I had to find out about this in the block explorer afterwards. I hope that other open source projects don't do the same and Firefox sends 5% of my paycheck to Mozilla when I sign in to my online banking lol

Although I think it was clear enough already, and in order to be as transparent as possible, I m adding a disclaimer:

FYI, Utopian doesn't fund SteemPlus, its not how it works; and budgets is dead.

Looks great, it will be much clearer now, thanks for adding this! I just re-added you as a witness. Keep up the great work!
By Utopian funding, I was referring to the utopian upvote that every open source project can get. Sorry to hear about budgets..

@steem-plus:

Today your project was featured on the #communitygrowthproject you can find the video Here

SteemPlus is a great Tool, the many features and options it opens up to users on the platform from search functions to single source linking down to in my opinion the best part shared rewards for post(great for communities) is simply a majestic interface overhaul.

If you ever need a user functionality overview in video format done feel free to hit me up it would be my pleasure. I appreciate the effort, and streamlined usability that steemplus brings to enhance the interface and it will be a standard tool in my Steem repository.

sir its really helpful post thanks for sharing

Me parece buena la aplicación plus, creo que vienen mejores cosas

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Really I love to using #steem-plus extension. Great work , Thanks to #steem-plus team. Waiting for the android version.