Applications Team Update 2: Signups, RocksDB, and Combating Abuse
Today’s @steemitblog post is brought to you by the Steemit Applications team. In this post, we highlight some of the projects we’ve been working on over the past few weeks.
Signups
Making improvements to the signup system continues to be one of our top priorities. This past week, we made several improvements to our signup “admin portal,” which will allow us to approve or reject new users more efficiently.
Deploying RocksDB to Production
Alongside the blockchain team, we’ve been working to get the latest steemd changes into production, which includes the RocksDB implementation of the account history plugin.
RocksDB is a fast-on-disk data store with an advanced caching layer, which reduces latency when reading/writing to and from the disk, as it’s optimized for fast, low-latency storage. As described in the blockchain team’s recent update post, this will significantly improve the performance of the account history plugin by reducing the RAM requirements, improving the replay time, and decreasing the amount of disk space needed.
Improving Steemit.com Faster
We upgraded our existing developer build system for steemit.com (known as condenser) and several other internal repositories. These changes have no direct impact on users, but they increase our development efficiency by speeding up build times when compiling source code, running tests, and deploying code to production. This will enable us to iterate faster, thereby making steemit.com an even better experience in less time.
Inactive Account De-Delegation
Steemit.com is not like other social apps. You need a little bit of Steem Power in order to post to the Steem blockchain. It’s one of the ways we allow people to transact on Steem for free, while also preventing people who are not invested in the future of Steem from spamming the network.
Steemit Inc. delegates Steem Power to all newcomers who sign up via steemit.com in order to provide a good experience for new users and to ensure they have enough bandwidth to make their first few posts.
In order to ensure that as many people as possible have as much bandwidth as possible, we have implemented a system that temporarily un-delegates Steem Power from accounts that have been inactive for 90 days. We still leave enough Steem Power for them to resume posting once they return, and the same system returns the remainder of their allocated delegation within an hour of the account becoming active again.
De-Delegating Abusive Accounts
We have developed an open and transparent process for removing delegations from abusive accounts which have been deemed ineligible for Steem Power delegation from Steemit, Inc. due to faucet abuse and/or ToS violations. This process will in no way inhibit a legitimate user’s ability to post to Steem.
You can find and contribute to the open list of abusive accounts here:
https://github.com/steemit/redeemer-irredeemables
It’s important to note that all we are doing is removing our delegation from these accounts. We are not depriving anyone, even bad actors, from posting to the Steem blockchain; we are only removing their ability to do it with our Steem Power (and the corresponding bandwidth), which could be used to help create new accounts and give new users the bandwidth they need to transact on the Steem blockchain - be it on steemit.com or any of the growing list of Steem applications, which can be seen on steemprojects.com.
We encourage members of the community who are involved in combating spam and abuse to submit abusive users to this list, so we can revoke their Steem Power. Please understand though, that we only intend to revoke Steem Power from users who are undeniably violating our ToS or abusing the faucet sign up. If it’s a gray area, we will side with the user. All pull requests should include sufficient documented proof for a reviewer to conclude that an account is violating our ToS or abusing the faucet sign up.
Condenser (steemit.com) Changes
The option to share posts via Reddit was added to the blog post page. This was a community-submitted enhancement (pull request 2773) made by @netuoso.
Another community-submitted pull request from GitHub user Nicknyr fixed a layout bug that involved the search bar overlapping the login and signup buttons. The pull request can be found here.
Community member caleblogan (GitHub user) submitted a pull request to fix a display bug that occurred when a video link was on the same line as other text.
Steem Python Library and Jussi Updates
We’ve made several changes to improve our official Steem Python library (example issues 156 and 181), as well as Jussi, our json-rpc reverse proxy (example issues 150 and 154). These changes improve the tools that the development community uses, which will make it easier for application developers and entrepreneurs to build applications powered by Steem.
Want to contribute?
Steem (the blockchain) and condenser (the code for steemit.com, the social application that’s run on Steem) are both open source projects. You can view all of our GitHub repositories here: https://github.com/steemit/
If you can code, you can look under the hood and find issues to work on. For example, if you have HTML, CSS or JavaScript skills, you could help improve steemit.com by looking at issues in the condenser repo. A good place to start is with issues labeled “help-wanted.”
If you are a proficient developer and want to work on an idea of your own, you can open up a GitHub issue in the appropriate repository and start a conversation with our development team about the change you’d like to implement.
Thanks for reading!
Steemit Applications Team
What happens to the steem power that is revoked from these accounts? Is it destroyed? What about distributing the steem power between various accounts like @curie and @steemiteducation etc to support more good quality users?
Delegation that is revoked just goes back to the account that delegated it.
that music is dope main, great song.
You mean people like the joke of Steemit Defense League will finally disappear?!
Oh wait, they are already here with your delegation.
Time to hop on that.
Better late than never, I suppose.
You should submit a pull request with proof that the accounts are "violating their ToS or abusing the faucet sign up."
I left a comment on the pull request including more information.
I'll get on it.
It's already been submitted by @themarkymark (thanks !), I added some information and links to explain the situation. Feel free to share some more information that you think could prove to be useful (https://github.com/steemit/redeemer-irredeemables/pull/6) !
@themarkymark, you are a champ!
Thanks.
Steemcleaners and cheetah - need to review so called abuser accounts on regular basis. The mechanism as of now is highly adhoc and frustrating
Guess that's what happens when you are caught plagiarizing on the trending page.
Anyways, not the topic at hand here.
But there need to be automatic review process
Great job TeamSteem!
Btw. my profile picture doesn't show up anymore next to my profile name?
(this problem started 2-3 days ago)
Fantastic news. 'You can still do the wrong thing, but not on our dime'
That should put a dent in some business models :)
Now that's my kind of sarcastic comment! Fair point.
You've done so much work! I'm happy that our system has such a great team! I wish you creative success. Let everything that you have in mind will necessarily come true!))) And we will help you))))
I hope it is small hard fork 😎😎😎😎
Thank you for your great work!!!!
None of these changes are related to the blockchain consensus logic, so they will not result in any forks.
I’ve taken to reporting the obvious spam bot account follows I’ve been getting to @steemcleaners and see that there is a SteemCleaners labeled text list in the Redeemer Github. I’m assuming this is merged into the official listing and is a valid channel for reporting abuse?
@steemcleaners is the right place to report spam and abuse, however, whether an account that is submitted to them is added to redeemer depends on whatever their process is. If you want to be certain that an account is added to the irredeemables list and delegation is removed then you would need to do so through the redeemer github. Thanks for helping!
Will do, thanks!
"De-Delegating Abusive Accounts", thank god, the Steemit Defence League was getting frustrating.
Thank you for keeping us informed on what you're doing and what matters to you right now. This is important for the community to know, and your posts are greatly appreciated.
And thank you for everything you do for Steem :)