@david.prochnow
Nope this may not exactly be entirely a bug per se, there was a patch recently implemented in the last Hard Fork 13 to address this same error message but there was also a change made to the ability to upvote with brand new accounts. This problem was especially addressed because it helped sort out an issue when it came to massive bot account creation and abuse as well as an error preventing users from removing their own up votes. I only mention this because I actually recognize the code change from a reply I received on Github about the patch.
The original intent of the recent changes were to encourage user participation and acceptance into the Steemit community before they were allowed to upvote on posts.
You are quite correct in your assumption that (abs_rshares) are a calculated as a result of your current SP which in turn effects your voting power. I'm not sure if this is quite working as intended though, so I'm going to help up vote this post and tag a few people to see if we can figure out exactly how to deal with this. In the mean time, posting and gaining SP through original posts and commenting on existing threads is definitely the way to go right now.
Doing so will both increase your exposure and help gain you upvotes which in turn will translate into more SP and result in a higher (abs_rshares) value.
Could someone else look into this as well, @ned, @dan, @anyx, @cryptogee, @arhag. Sorry to just tag you guys in (and if I missed the person who pushed the patch) but I wasn't sure if this was working exactly as intended. I know this same error message was supposed to be recently addressed with a patch meant to fix the inability to remove our own upvotes and I wanted to double check that this wasn't an accidental unintended side effect from that patch.
I just wanted someone else to double check and weigh in on this to see if it is in fact working as intended or if it needs a bit of a revision because it looks like it may not be working exactly as intended but I wasn't the one to review or push the patch so I may also be incorrect.
In fact even commenting and publishing new blogposts can be blocked with the "Transaction failed" message.
@david.prochnow Wait, it happens sometimes but not others? I'm probably not going to be able to figure out what the deal is tonight if it can't be recreated 100% of the time by doing the same thing twice. I heard mention of a 30 minute waiting period but I'm not sure if that's the deal in this case either.
Regardless of the cause I'll go track someone down by hand and try to figure this one out for you because now I'm wondering what happened as well. If this platform managed to accidentally handicap new users to the point where the platform is unusable that's one thing. But if this was by design then I'll go raise hell for you because that would very possibly be the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Invite people to an unusable platform?
Yeah that'll go over well... Most people will just give up and move on, or go back to reddit/facebook because at least there they can use the freaking thing... >facepalm<
I seriously hope this was unintended and is just a coding error but I'll have to read it all to know for sure. There's been so much melodrama over recent unilateral changes without any discussion of thought first I'm sorry if I seem mad, because it's not at you. Not even a little, I'm tired of every new patch that seems to be almost designed to tie peoples hands or even go so far as to knock the legs out from under them altogether. I had hopped by maybe tagging some of the other coders someone would even look at this but it appears I'm going to have to take a more proactive almost "in their face" approach to get some answers. Sorry you're having to go through all this, but I'll keep at it and let you know because frankly if it's happened to you and you were one of the few to speak up, then it's already happened to many others that already moved on.
I'll be in touch once I figure something out. I guess I should have expected these kinds of issues a bit more during a beta but things were working just fine before HF 13 so I don't see why everything is just a massive mess after HF 13. Hang in there man, I've finally had enough that I've already let loose on Github and it seems like steemit.chat is my next stop on the "hate me if you want to for speaking my mind" train...
I can't reproduce the error message right now and today everything seems fine so far.
But I guess it has not been completely arbitrary behaviour, but dependet on the cooldown-time of my voting-power. In so far things worked like planned.
My problem, at least yesterday, was that I wasn't able to recognize a clear relationship between my voting power (according to steemd.com and steemstats.com) and the error. But if new users get penalized in some way, that might explain the situation.
It's not really that they get penalized, it's more their initial lack of Steem Power that both solved one problem but sort of created another. It was a system that was meant to throttle posting and voting from brand new accounts in the hope of preventing account creation abuse, and also to stop newly made bot accounts from running rampant.
Every account is effected by the voting power curvature issue but it seems to affect lower Steem Powered accounts more than Higher Steem Powered accounts.
In any case I'm glad things are working better for you today. I tagged the account so I could keep an eye on it and it seems like you've already been racking up some post and vote rewards so hopefully you'll be all good from here on out.
Yesterday was a bit of a mess in terms of outrage on the platform and I was about ready to go crazy if yet another change meant to do good had killed yet another function of the platform.
I registred yesterday and I am facing the same problem. I cannot vote and when I tried to upload my introduceyourself I got the same error. Is there yet something known about this ''Transaction failed'' message?