I completed my third week of running my witness and seed nodes and here's the weekly update.
The Bandwidth Situation
Last week has been quite busy for witnesses. We were scrambling to address the bandwidth issue that many users with low Steem Power were having. The Steem developers were notified of the problem and quickly started to work on a fix. While we waited, the witnesses thought of a temporary workaround by increasing the maximum block size from 65536 to 131072 bytes. However, while trying to fix one thing, something else broke. In fact, the workaround did improve the bandwidth errors, but it lead to an unexpected overflow bug in the bandwidth algorithm.
The new update fixes those problems https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.19.1, among other bug fixes and enhancements.
There were two big problems with the bandwidth algorithm. The first was an integer overflow that caused max_virtual_bandwidth to be calculated incorrectly. The second was a programmed behavior that caused bandwidth requirements to increase too rapidly for a small increase in traffic. We have implemented a new algorithm for how to calculate global bandwidth requirements that still protects the blockchain under extreme circumstances, but is less aggressive during small deviations from past behavior. Overall, this should improve the user experience when it comes to bandwidth rate limiting.
Being a dedicated witness, I quickly applied the 0.19.1 RC1 update, like most of the witnesses. When 0.19.1 came out a few days later, it wasn't necessary to re-update for those who already applied the RC1. It's all good.
I would like to thank all the developers and witnesses for their prompt reaction. This was a demonstration of the efficiency of the Steem platform that you won't find elsewhere, right Bitcoin? 😉
Also, @roadscape updated his website to show the bandwidth level in a more user friendly configuration, among other little useful parameters. You can check it at https://steemd.com/@yourusername.
Fighting Spam
I finally decided to stop tolerating spammers, I wrote a post about that a couple of days ago: Time To Fight Spam. No More Passive Resistance!. I'm happy with the feedback it got. I'm hanging out in the @steemcleaners channels on Steemit.chat and guiding others with what I can. I'm learning who's who, what's what, and with time, I may play a bigger role in this area. Tip of my hat to the people already involved in fighting spammers and abusers.
The Good Samaritan
I continue my coordinated work with @timcliff in the https://steemit.chat/channel/help channel. When he's not around, I screen the various queries and relay to him the ones related to signup problems, while I address the more common concerns with the best of my abilities. If you don't know who @timcliff is, check him out and see how he operates. I made a tribute to him recently 👍
Miscellaneous
I gained some more witness votes which put me now at rank 84, and I'm very happy to have reached 500+ followers, it's a new milestone, thank you.
Remember, you can vote for a maximum of 30 witnesses. Witness voting is different from upvoting: it doesn't cost you anything and doesn't affect your voting power. Every vote is important to me, whether you're a minnow 🐟, a dolphin 🐬 or a whale 🐳.
Witnesses are the backbone of Steem, they host the blockchain in the background, and I'm happy to be part of that.
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🗳 Check out my Steem witness application and vote for me. 🗳
Thank you.
Alternatively, you can issue this command in cli_wallet (after unlocking it)
vote_for_witness "YOURACCOUNT" "drakos" true true