New Logo!
Those of you who follow me know that I held a contest for a new logo for the Steem Bot Tracker website. The winner was @creativista who created this great design which henceforth will be the new logo for the Steem Bot Tracker website and any related tools and services:
Front Run ALL THE BOTS!
If you look carefully you'll see there's a new menu item added in the Tools drop down called "Front Run the Bots". If you choose that option it will open a popup that shows a list of posts with the highest amount of outstanding bids among all the bid-based voting bots tracked on the site.
It will also show the current payout value for each of those posts, the expected vote value from the bots on which the post was bid, and it will calculate the expected curation reward ROI from voting on the post before the bots do. It will sort all of the posts by expected curation reward returns so you can see the best ones to front-run at the top.
If you're logged in with SteemConnect then you'll have the option to upvote each post on the list (with a 100% weight vote) right from that popup.
Moved Bot Lists Out of JS Code
Previously the list of bots in the bid-based voting bots section and in the other bots section were hard-coded right in the main JS code file. This was bad for a number of reasons, but the main one being that I had to update the site code every time I wanted to add another bot to the site.
People bug me on a regular basis to add their bot to the site, and I try to accommodate them all as quickly as possible, but when I had to update the code, minify it, push it to GitHub, and then update the actual site it was a slow and involved process.
I've finally gotten around to moving those lists out of the code into separate JSON files on my web server that the code just grabs with a get request when the page is first loaded. Now I can much more easily add new bots to the site and get all of the eager new bot owners off my back :-P
Other Small Changes
User @simplymike pointed out that with so many bots it's really hard to find the bot you want in the list in the vote calculator! I apologize for not noticing this for so long - I don't use the vote calculator much myself - and when I first created it there were only about 8 bid-based voting bots. Anyway, for those of you who use it, the list is now sorted alphabetically so you can easily find your favorite bot!
Additionally the more astute users may have noticed that there have been some slight wording changes on the site. I've taken out the word "profitable" from most everywhere it was originally written on the site. You'll notice that what used to be the "Max Profitable Bid" column in the table is now called "Max Suggested Bid".
The reason for this change is that I don't want to encourage the idea that bot votes are supposed to be profitable on their own. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, but the purpose of using voting bots is to promote your post so that it shows higher in the categories for which it's tagged. That will lead to your posts getting more views and, if the content is good, you will get more followers and more organic upvotes which is where the real profit should come from when using voting bots.
Thanks for your support!
As always I want to thank everyone who has helped and supported me in creating this tool. I love that it has been able to help so many people learn about and use vote selling services to promote their content and grow their following and earnings on the Steem platform. Please stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!
Links to relevant commits:
- Moved the lists of bots to external files
- Added new logo!
- Sorted bot list in vote calculator
- Added a front run the bots option
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors