Since its early days, the curators and reviewers at @curie have been using the Streemian platform for managing their submissions and review process. Unfortunately, this is a closed project with no way to improve or change the functionality that it provides, or implement new features.

However, today all that changes and we are migrating our curation operations onto our new submission platform - "Becquerel"

Becquerel initially provides all of the functionality that the old platform does, as well as a few new ones. As time goes on, more features will be added to make curator's and reviewer's lives a lot easier.

Current Functionality

Home page

Whether you are logged in as a curie curator, or just hitting the site as an interested Steem user, you will see the home page which shows all of the posts that have been submitted and approved by curie. A new feature here is that you can scroll back through all historical posts. Clicking the post will open it in Steemit.com.

You may also notice that the top of the screen shows some of your weekly statistics. For a curator, this is a new and invaluable mechanism for keeping track of how you are doing.

Propose Page

This is where the curie curators hang out. Same as before though; drop a URL that you think is exceptional here with a nice comment for the reviewer as to why you think this post should get a curie. You will get some more useful information if you hit any of your limits or if the post is not valid for some reason (i.e. over 24 hours old, younger than your curation tier allows, or if you have reached your submission count limit for the day or week)

^{Please excuse the red underline, that's my grammar checker}

One thing that curators will notice is that the Google Captcha has gone. However, in order to prevent submission spamming, there is a 10-second cooldown once you have clicked the submit button, in which time you cannot click it again.

Review Page

This is where all submitted posts will appear for the reviewers to check out. They have the usual options; Approve, Reject, Close or Comment.

Reviewers can leave comments for each other or for the curator who submitted the post if they so desire. The small 'eye' icon allows reviewers to see the post quickly in a popout frame without going to Steemit.com, and the small blue arrow allows them to open this in Steemit.

User Admin

We have different levels of user admin configured, but the main gist of it is that you can do everything you would expect to do - add a user, remove a user, set the user's permissions in Becquerel and assign them curation limits.

Reporting

Of course, providing a way for the curie administrators to see what has been submitted, who has reviewed what and what the weekly/montly scores are is a requirement. The reports functionality provides 3 csv outputs.

Basic Report which shows each curator (or a selected curator) and their scores for the selected time frame
Detailed Report which shows the same, but with details of each individual submission
Reviewer Report which shows which reviewer has given which action to each post in the selected time frame.

Now for some technical stuff.....

Becquerel is backed by a MongoDB database which is running with a primary and secondary DB node on an AWS shared cluster. This gives resiliency against any database issues. Backups of the database are done daily.

At the front end, we have a React UI, which in the future will be extended to give React Native implementations, allowing the tool to be used as an application on many platforms natively. Expect an Android and iOS version in the future!

The glue that connects the front end and back end together is a Nodejs/express layer which handles all requests, checking authorizations with express middleware which ensures that only curators can submit posts and see the screens that they are allowed to.

Login is done using SteemConnect, although we do not use any keys, just a login check to make sure that you are a Steem user. All client-side permissions are stored with a JSON Web Token to ensure their integrity and then all calls made through to the server are checked against the permissions in the database to prevent user spoofing.

The future

So I have a list of features as long as my arm for future releases, but here are a few

Improved curator reporting. Allowing full reporting in the same way as the administrators do for your own submissions.
Indication of next open slots for curators
Indication of curators current curation tier
Desktop push notifications for submission status changes
Inbuilt blacklisting to prevent the submission and reviewing of blacklisted authors
Multi-group features. If you have your own curation group, you can use Becquerel as your own submission platform FOR FREE, FOREVER
Publically visible curation leaderboards
Curie statistics on the homepage such as approval graphs, rewards generated for authors etc
More system configuration such as default viewing website (busy.org etc)
Direct link in from steemlookup.com to allow curators to find posts on there and populate becquerel with one click

Becquerel has been developed by myself with input and testing from many people in the @curie community, without whom this wouldnt have been possible so thanks to you all.

Regards

Mark

Introducing Becquerel, the new Curie submission platform.