Well, it certainly has been an exciting couple weeks here on Steemit, with the price of Steem once again hitting that psychologically important $1.00 milestone and plenty of new users joining! Post payouts are increasing, meaning it's a perfect time to capitalize on all the action by using Steemvoter to support your favorite authors & boost your curation rewards. If you haven't signed up yet, go to https://steemvoter.com/ and get started today for free!
Now we bring you another edition of the Steemvoter Week In Review newsletter. This is an opportunity to highlight winning SV Guild picks from the previous week. Since post payouts happen at the end of a 7-day window, we feel it's fair to give our winners one more chance at getting some recognition before their payout periods close. These are hand-picked community recommendations that you won't want to miss!
In addition, we'll share any updates that the owners of Steemvoter care to pass along plus a Tip of the Week for getting the most out of the Steemvoter service. Without further ado, we present... drum roll please...
Last week's guild vote winners
The Goodness Of Humanity || Are We Even Worth It ? by @deepapoudel
Author @deepapoudel joined Steemit in March, and we are proud to welcome her to our community, her latest post speaks of humanity and gives us a philosophical view on the human soul and how we were all created equal and innocent, but later divided into good and bad by life experience. Her post was largely undervalued at just under 2 Dollars in value before our guild vote and we hope we can make a difference to her post in that same way she wishes to make a difference to the world. Namaste @deepapoudel, bless you.
Physical inactivity in teenagers: Its causes by @addicted7abinash
We love seeing new users continuing to join Steemit and discover the joys of being a part of our community. So it gives us great pleasure to give today's guild vote to @addicted7abinash, who is from India and joined Steemit only 5 days ago. In this post he raises the serious topic of declining physical activity among the teenage demographic, a worrying trend made all too easy by the comforts & wired nature of today's fast-paced modern world. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint @addicted7abinash. Enjoy the guild vote and welcome to the wonderful world of Steemit!
Writers Block - Tips to help by @webdeals
It's great to see "veteran" Steem community members still around and posting content that readers enjoy enough to nominate; @webdeals has been on Steem since July 2016, that's nearly a full year, great dedication friend! He is an animal vet by trade, working in the United Kingdom, but originally from Italy, he is a great guy with a passion for animals, food and travel, his locational photos exhibited in past posts are really good. Keep up the great work and dedication @webdeals.
How overpopulation is the root of poverty in India (and the rest of the world) by @maya7
@maya7 is a new Steemit user who only joined a few days ago after being introduced to the platform by her son. In this post she discusses some of the problems facing her home country India today, and how these issues have a common cause: overpopulation. We think that the first step in solving a problem lies in recognizing that the problem exists, so it's great to see @maya7 raising awareness and starting a conversation around this important topic. Steemit is the perfect platform for bringing power back to the people & empowering individuals to better their circumstances, and we are happy to help out with today's guild vote. Steem on @maya7!
Steemvoter Service Update
There are three things to update you on today:
We are in the final phases of our big web server migration project. Our new server is setup, tested, and ready for use. All we need to do now is point the steemvoter.com domain to the new server and get a new SSL certificate setup. There is likely to be some disruption to site availability as we carry out these final steps, though your voting rules will continue to work uninterrupted. We'll post updates on our #steemvoter.com Steemit Chat channel as we move forward with this.
In other news, we've known for some time about a bug in the Piston library (the third party software code we use to interface with the Steem blockchain) that was causing user accounts to go into an error state. This only affected new Steemit users who have signed up since April. Last week we implemented a work-around for this problem, so there should be no further trouble going forward. If your account is still in an error state, please follow the advice in the tip of the week for Apr. 9 - 15 to re-activate your account.
There's a housekeeping feature in the works that will automatically disable accounts that have too many voting failures in a row. This could happen for a number of reasons, such as using an invalid posting key or a user who powered down and no longer has enough Steem Power to vote. If your account is disabled in this fashion, you'll receive a notification reminding you to take corrective action. Currently we have many dead accounts in our system, so implementing this will trim some fat from the database and improve the efficiency of our voting scripts.
Tip of the Week - conserving voting power
As you add more & more voting rules, you will want to keep a close eye on your voting power. It's easy to accidentally drain your voting power if you add too many rules. With low voting power your votes will be less effective and earn you fewer curation rewards.
You can check your account's voting power by clicking on the "GET VP" button from the main Steemvoter screen:
Ideally you want your voting power to hover around 80%, which means you are voting often enough not to leave any votes on the table, so to speak, but still earning good curation rewards. I checked my voting power earlier today, and discovered I'm starting to get a bit low:
There are several ways you can tweak your voting rules to allow your voting power to recharge back to more comfortable levels. The easiest way is to simply reduce the weight of each of your votes. A vote at 50% power, for example, uses only half as much of your overall voting power as a vote at 100%. But the flip side is it's only half as effective, and you'll get half the curation reward as well. Here, I've edited my rules to reduce the vote power of each rule from 100% to 80% (just click the green EDIT button next to each rule to do this):
Of course, this gets tedious fast if you have hundreds of rules. For such exceptional cases, we will be happy to do a bulk adjustment of your rules for you upon request. Unfortunately, there's no way yet for you to edit all rules at once through the web site, but we are planning to add such a feature in the future.
Sometimes you might have a voting rule setup for someone who posts quite often, maybe several times per day. These people can be a big drain on your voting power. So if you have rules set for such prolific authors, another option is to disable the rule temporarily by unchecking the "Active Rule" checkbox. You can always turn the rule back on again later after your voting power has recharged.
If all else fails, you can disable your account completely by using the "PAUSE" button from the main Steemvoter screen:
When an account is paused, all voting rules will be disabled (this overrides the "Active Rule" checkbox). During this time, the account status will also say "Paused" to make it obvious. When your voting power has recharged enough, simply unpause your account by pressing the "PLAY" button:
Remember: good voting power management is one of the keys to maximizing curation rewards, and doing it effectively is a fine balancing act. Voting rules should not be fire and forget; you have to give them tender loving care to get the most benefit out of them!
And that's it for this edition of the Steemvoter Week In Review. We wish all of you a great week ahead!
Steemvoter is an automatic voting service that votes on your behalf according to rules you set. You can control who the service votes on, how much voting power is used, and when to vote. Steemvoter will work for you 24 hours a day, so you never miss voting on your favorite authors! Sign up for free at https://steemvoter.com/
Image credits: screen shots and Steemvoter logo are courtesy of the Steemvoter team. All other images in this post, including the calendar in the title, are taken from Pixabay and used under Creative Commons CC0