Big Thanks to, and an Overview of the Sponsors to the Welcoming Con...

@reggaemuffin @aggroed @ausbitbank and @swelker101 are all Steem Witneses, as well as the sponsors to the Welcoming Contest I've been hosting for over a month! If for some reason you didn't notice, here are the links to the contest posts we've had so far.

(by: @creativesoul)

During this contest, we've learned what are the favorite How-to guides are, we've created images to make welcoming new users a beautiful experience, collected non-english Steem Guides, discussed how best to welcome new users, and gone over the practice of creating an encouraging welcoming message with helpful advice and resources. If you are new here, and still trying to find your way, it might do you well, to go through the previous posts which are full of much valuable information.

To date 587.5 Steem has been awarded in 113 individual prizes!!!!!

There are a couple more rounds to go where we will be incentivizing users to go out and do some actual welcoming. Before we do that, I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk about the sponsors of this contest, and highlight some of the awesome things they do for the community.

@reggaemuffin Witness #49 - 500 Steem Donated

This contest started out as an idea @reggamuffin had in chat with me one day about 4 months ago. I went along with the spirit of his idea and started coming up with this series of contest posts and he agreed to donate 500 steem for a prize pool!

Reggaemuffin has been very helpful to me from an early stage in my steem journys. He took time to help me with posts, and considered suggestions I had for him as a witness. Lets take a moment to find out a little more about @reggaemuffin:

Having just broken into the top 50 witnesses, Reggae is currently witness #49 (how exciting!!) He started out on steem 8 months ago. Very early on in his journey he started digging deep into the Steem Universe. By his 5th post he was writing helpful apps for steem. His 6th post was an impressive list of apps and other web-resources all related to Steem. By his 7th post he had created @welcomebot a bot that would automatically welcome users who posted in the intro tags, as well as steemgreet, and app that that would let you vote on all of the same posts that @welcomebot did. @welcomebot gave me one of the first comments I ever got on my posts, and that's how I ended up meeting him. After the announcment for @welcomebot, his next post was a Welcome Givaway to help encourage brand new users by offering them the chance to recieve a whale vote!

[@welcomebot isn't active anymore since it was copied by many spammy bots, and there were too many bot comments on new users posts, but it's still something I remember fondly!]

Quite incredible! Here is someone who has been passionate about coding with Steem, and helping new users from the very start. A while back I wrote a couple posts that went over his entire blog history covering the highlights, and included an interview. If you are interested in finding out more about @reggaemuffin, you should check those posts HERE and HERE.

From his witness update a few weeks ago we learn that his witness node and seed node are running smoothly and haven't had any outages, or missed blocks. @reggaemuffin is one of the founders of @buildteam who has just gotten a second RPC node live, which will help all of the other developers who have been appreciating how reliable theirs is. Additionally, he will be reviewing source code for new hard forks, as well as testing in the test net.

All of that adds up to a stronger network that keeps this whole steem ecosystem going strong!

@aggroed Witness #7 - 100 Steem Donated

When I first mentioned the idea of the Welcoming Contest to @aggroed, the value of steem was quite a bit lower, and I was concerned that I didn't have quite enough funds to make it really excellent. He was more than happy to support the contest with 100 steem, some votes and some resteems :) Lets go over a bit of who aggroed is and what he does on Steem.

His first post on steemit over a year ago was called What's it mean to be Aggroed? He talks about becoming an activist. "I lived a nice quiet life, in a nice quiet town, with a nice quiet family, going to nice private schools. I should love the system." At some point he woke up and realized that the system is broken, and all of his viewpoints regarding it were too. Then he talks about how in World of Warcraft if you walk too close to a monster that would otherwise not bother you, it wakes up, becomes "aggroed" and starts attacking you.

"I was passively asleep obeying the system until it woke me up. Now I've been aggroed. Now I'm Aggroed."

He went on and blogged for quite some time mostly about political topics. Then about 8 months ago he started writing some helpful posts for new Steemizens. Among those posts he wrote for new users is: "I'm new here. Can you explain Steemit to me like I'm 5?" One I really enjoy is: "Satirically Yours: Shit-Posting 101".

It's giving me a lot of perspective to go through @aggroed's old blog posts, and shows me more of what kind of a person he really is. About the same time that he started writing helpful posts for new users, the Minnow Support Project was born with a weekly minnow resteem contest. A couple days later he came out with this post which I felt like I should share a bit of here. "My Steemit Mission Statement:

"As a blogger on steemit I intend to spread peace, abundance, and liberty. I'll help educate people on this platform in terms of the technical use, social use, and values embodied by it's community. I will help spread this platform, the knowledge of it's users, and the power of it's currency beyond it's current capacity. I'll grow as a an author to inspire other writers, to show them the ropes, and create a warm welcome whenever possible. I'll grow as a person and continue to develop programming skills so that I can contribute to more aspects of this platform. And I'll do my best to give back more to this platform than it gives to me.

In the next month or two I'm going to try a witness run. Hopefully you'll support me there too."

That was back in May, now MSP is the largest Steem community, has a 24/7/365 Radio station, and involved in almost every corner of the steemiverse. @aggroed is hosting 2 radio shows a week. He has also been using MSPWaves to host Witness Forums that get a bunch of witnesses together in a voice chat, live on air, to talk about what's going on with steem, and how to make it better. He's also been working with some of the folk who have large youtube accounts on how to get more of the youtube crowd here. Recently, he quit his job, so he could persue Steem full time! All in all, if you haven't noticed what all @aggroed has been up to, I'd have to say you just haven't been paying attention!

Check out his most recent witness update for more info.

@ausbitbank Witness #15 - 100 Steem Donated

Ausbitbank helped to found the Minnow Support Project with @aggroed. I've had a few nice chats with him, and since he seems to generally be helpful to minnows, I also asked him if he'd help with the contest. Ask and ye shall recieve, as they say. Let's take a look at a bit of his history, and what he does for the Steem platform.

He joined in July of 2016, and hit the ground running! His very first post was code for a dark theme for steemit. A little more than a year later Steemit followed suit and built one right into the website! In his post Seem Addiction Day 10, he begins a list of steem web-resources, and mentions some steem related domains that he started buying! Pretty shortly he started recruiting all kinds of people to steemit, and coding more and more random apps for steem. Like most developers who hit the blockchain, writing useful apps for the masses, he quickly found a warm welcome.

Now a days he doesn't blog too much on steem, but he's very active behind the scenes. I have word that he's been looking at the code for the upcoming communities features, and planning to offer services for it once he learns the code better, possibly including working on that code some himself. One thing that he's been doing since before I came to steem is supporting new users with upvotes. He is someone I can recall voting on my posts from a very early stage in the game. That's information not easily found in his blog, so I decided to ask:

"I just try and keep an eye on introduceyourself for people that stand out , as well as watching the votes and resteems of heaps of long time curators. Resteems from trusted curators, and seeing people make quality content for a good while without rewards will usually make me wanna help people out. Good community engagement counts for a lot, I usually check out their comments for spam etc."

"I'm relying more and more on other curators then I used to, its hard to find a balance between keeping track of whats on Steem today and getting other work done. I've given up on giving big votes a lot of the time, its more effective and interesting to me to try and get something on as many users posts as possible. I hate seeing quality posts with no response, even just being able to add $1 without needing to rely on bidbots etc seems to make a big difference to keeping people active."

He has Witness Node, Backup Node, Seed Node, and RPC Node running. He's also planning to expand his Steem server network to include the full suite of Jussi, Hivemind, and Steem Blockchain Data Service servers. "We can never have too many resources for developers!" - @ausbitbank

Feel free to check out his latest witness update if you want to find out more.

@swelker101 - Witness #100 - Donating a 4 week 500sp Delegation

Shane is one of my favorite MSP mods, who also is one of my favorite MSPWaves Radio Hosts. "Blame Shane" is a running gag over at MSP, and when I first encountered it I wasn't really sure what to make of it. Once I had to get the chance to know him, all I can say is that he's a great guy. He doesn't have as large of an account as our other witness sponsors, but he's definitely got a HUUUGE heart.

He started out on Steem 9 months ago, and not too long afterwards found out about PAL\MSP. Inspired by a meeting he went to he decided to do a giveaway to help out other minnows. Next thing you know, he was writing helpful guides, and doing more giveaways, while promoting MSP. He's continued to work hard to be helpful to other users, and in my opinion, has been integral to the growth and success of the Minnow Support Project.

From his most recent witness update we find out a bit of what he does here in the steemiverse:

6 radio shows between MSPwaves and The Writer's Block

I'm a Sr. Mod at MSP and a Moderator at The Writer's Block

I started @minnowuniversity to help guide new users into understanding the platform and creating successful accounts Discord Server for MinnowU

I support the Music and Arts community with my Steemit Creative Curation Show. I donate 15 SBD per week for the Steemit Musicians winners. I currently delegate 500 SP to @msp-music, which curates music, arts, and writing.

I run @upgoater, which donates a percentage of its earning to @msp-waves and @tarc

I run @msp-shanehug which is a delegation account geared towards helping new users gain some traction.

He runs bots strictly for the purposes of helping new users out. He's on the radio spreading cheer, and good vibes (I love your voice Shane). For as long as I can remember he's done weekly slider givaways during his radio shows, which means he was giving people 4 week 500sp delegations live on air. Although I've heard the market is pretty tough for leasing delegations right now, so this may be on hold.

He's out there on the front lines in the discord servers, helping new users, and bringing cheer, every day. He's someone I really believe in, and I hope you all will give him a vote :) You'll also want to go check him out on air at MSPWaves, and the Writers Block. You won't regret it!

(by @shello)

If you'd like to vote for these witnesses in appreciation for what they are doing on this platform you can use these links here:

Vote for @reggaemuffin!

Vote for @aggroed!

Vote for @ausbitbank!

Vote for @swelker101!

Or, if you prefer doing it manually through the steemit website follow these instructions:

First, go to: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

You'll see a list that looks like this:

For all of the witnesses in the top 50 you can simply go to their names, and click the little upvote button next to their name. That makes it simple for you to go ahead an vote for @aggroed, @ausbitbank, and @reggaemuffin.

For @swelker101 you'll have to go to the box at the bottom of the page, and enter his name, then click vote. Be warned, after you put his name in the box and hit enter, you won't see any evidence that anything happened. Don't type in his name again, or else you'll probably accidentally unvote them. After you've entered your key to submit the vote, you can refresh the page to make sure he shows up in the list of witnesses you vote for who aren't in the top 50.

Another Thank You and Final Thoughts

I have so much appreciation for these 4 witnesses, not just for sponsoring this contest, but for everything they have done, and continue to do for this community. They are all great examples of how helping new users, and developing this community are rewarded. Helping other users is one of the most rewarded activities on Steem. There are so many different ways to bring value to this community!

Have Fun, and Steem On!

Big Thanks to, and an Overview of the Sponsors to the Welcoming Contest