Beware Inactive Witnesses - Witness Stats Released

in #witness-category7 years ago (edited)

Introducing Witness Stats

Brought to you by STEEM Liberator - @netuoso (vote me as witness)

Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 8.56.59 PM.png

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

Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 7.48.47 PM.png
Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 7.48.59 PM.png

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:
Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 7.56.05 PM.png

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:

Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 8.51.43 PM.png
(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:
Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 8.53.12 PM.png

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

  1. Go to the witness voting page on SteemIt.com
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the vote box (shown below)
  3. Input my name (netuoso) and hit vote.
    Screen Shot 2017-07-08 at 4.49.38 PM.png
  4. 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.

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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.

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!.

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:
Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 8.53.12 PM.png

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 :)

What do you have for interest rate? If it's positive I'll vote for you.

Btw, interest rate for my witness is at 2% right now.

It was 2% a week ago and it was decreased with the prices going back up. I have been considering if it should be increased back up.

If you can make a compelling argument why it should be increased I would love to consider it and possibly update after lunch.

I think it should always be above 0 as a philosophy. You are asking people to store money there. The convertible portion of the note can fluctuate and might lead to higher than a$1 value but the coupon should alsoways be above 0. Preferably it should be high enough that when the convert is valued at 0( in a selloff aka a busted convert) sbd stays above $1 just on the power of interest rates.

This is exactly the type of tool needed. Hopefully the Steemit community in general gets a better understanding of why it's important to keep their Witness votes updated.

You should be wary of putting your private keys on any website, including mine.Things can happen even when people take every possible precaution.

Well said, netuoso

Good Luck future witness

I don't quite understand this concept . . .but . . I will soon! Thanks for bring it to my attention. Up-Voted

yup with you on that

I am so glad you did this, it was sorely needed. Thank you for your hard work @netuoso.

This tool is incredibly useful. I find the task of keeping up with my witness votes daunting, it's a lot to think about, and this makes it so much easier to get all my info in one place.

I added you as a witness vote :-D

Thanks :)

Thank for sharing :D

its ur repo charts @netuoso but i see these first time

This post received a 95% vote by @minnowsupport courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.

This post received a 95% vote by @msp-lovebot courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.

This post has been resteemed by @nettybot courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.

This post has been resteemed by @msp-lovebot courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.

This post has been resteemed by @msp-waves courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.

This post has been resteemed by @minnowsupport courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.

For the sake of our country. Cast your vote. Make Steemit great again ^_^

I'll support him...

I'm with you @netuoso

very informative post,thanks for that.you have my witness vote and all the others from the minnow support project(only had ausbitbank so far)
been all added....
keep up the great work you guys are doing...

This is freaking awesome man! Thanks so much for doing this! Ya got my vote and maybe you'll consider tossing a vote my way as well ;)

Anyway, cheers and Steem on!

I looked into your posts and offerings and decided to give you one of my remaining votes. Keep on campaigning! It is a constant battle

Thanks, means a lot! Funny I have been working on the same (all be it very primitive tools) as yourself. Cooking up a more intuitive voting webpage that makes it easier to vote for unknowns past top 100 without knowing their username tonight.

Thanks for this!!

Thanks for sharing this information. Ive looked a few times and havent been able to find anything like this.

Thanks for the post, you've got a new witness voter ;)

Grt innovation!

Yeah there is definitely some vote-for-vote going on near the top, but the community can beat that if they so desired. Top witness votes carry some serious weight, but a bunch of minnows can eventually overpower it all the same.

It takes more work and effort of course.

(I self vote my own witness and I am still researching the other witnesses to give my votes to)

I have my doubts that minnows could generate enough power, but they could use social pressure, for what it’s worth.

@netuoso you are doing great service to the society

Voted for you. All the best.

Hello @netuoso, being a newbie, I do not understand the nuances of Steemit to the fullest. Not really sure of who a witness is or what a witness vote signify. With whatever elumentary understanding I have of it, it seemed to me that you are active and updated and still ranked 102, whereas there are several others who aren't as active and still ranked above you.
A reference link of sort explaining witness Funda would be great.... ✌️ Peace..!!

Upvoted and RESTEEMED :)

Thanks for the information on the site. I'll def look into it and check you out. So far it seems like you'll be getting my vote. Followed you. Keep us posted.

Good reminder! Thank you for supporting my witness and I'll be supporting you whenever I can. Also you made me realized my price feed had crash. I'm looking into it.

Cheers mate

Thank you for the posts, will definitely check out your tool and update my Witness vote list.

Good Luck future witness!!!

I know I been lazy on researching and finding witness to vote for. But what the heck. How can one be a witness if they don’t even…. WITNESS!!!!!!

@netuoso i have voted you as a witness....i am relatively new in steemit...could you help me with something?how can i increase steem power without buying it? And how do i increase curation and author rewards...i have zero rewards at the moment

This is valuable information, thank you!

Thank you for bringing up this issue - most Steemians are unaware of this - myself included.

Thanks for making witnesses and voting for them a little less esoteric. I witnessed voted you cuz youre the best :)

Mucho lovo

Fantastic!
I will include this in my curation project of MUST READ POSTS.
SteemON!

Thanks man

No thank you. Im going to promote this post for you tomorrow.

All my votes are for you. Keep the good content coming.

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