Some of you were wondering what's been happening with the two highlighters that we run.

What are highlighters?

Highlighters are automated curation list bots that scrape the blockchain for opt-in content, then upvote and make an easy to follow reading list. The #SteemSilverGold highlighter looks for posts within the precious metals community that fit a predefined set of parameters. The #Veterans highlighter simply makes a list of posts by military veterans on the STEEM blockchain. The posts are automated.

The posts that the highlighters produce may look the same but the algorithms are very different. They aim to showcase quality content. Content must pass through anti-abuse requirements in order to be featured, even if the account is on the list.

What happened to them?

The highlighters relied on @furion's SteemData to interact with the blockchain and execute complex algorithms. That's how they were written originally, mostly to save some time by leveraging an existing tool. Unfortunately, the service went down over the holiday season as @furion had to move datacenters. You can read his post about it here and latest update here. Both highlighters were kept down as members of our team were away and unable to rewrite the code.

What's happening now?

After a while, the #Veterans highlighter was manually reactivated by @inthenow, who daily puts hours in to manually list all of the accounts. He's doing a great job and deserves the praise and support of the community for his efforts.

This weekend, the #SteemSilverGold highlighter was rewritten leveraging @arcange's Steem SQL. While rewriting the code to pull directly from the blockchain we thought it may be a good idea to see if this would be a better opportunity. One reason is to alleviate the load the query would put on a publicly-provided RPC Node. These aren't simple queries and hammering a node that another team provided to the community wouldn't be that good of an idea. Having said that, because these are not simple queries, the new highlighter has some bugs that will have to be worked out. It is simply too complex.

Roadmap

#SteemSilverGold Highlighter

Debugging

The next steps are to re-establish the #SteemSilverGold highlighter properly. This will take a week or so in both debugging and potentially rewriting.

Membership List

Concurrently to the debugging portion will be the re-establishment of a solid home for the member account list. Previously and to-date, the list was housed in the 'Following' section of @silvergoldbotty. Earlier this year #SteemSilverGold membership and @silvergoldbotty membership was split (I was away at the time and not privy to exactly what transpired verbatim). The new list will be housed on a new account that will be shortly registered and clearly announced in a separate post. Tomorrow, the #SteemSilverGold highlighter will run off that new account with the full membership list.

Reassessment

Two distinct codes will be the eventual result of this process following the debugging operation. One will be compatible with SteemData and one with Steem SQL. This will ensure that if one stops operations, the highlighter can fail-over to the other.

#Veterans Highlighter

Rewriting

The highlighter will be rewritten leveraging 'lessons learned' from debugging the #SteemSilverGold highlighter. Like the former, it will be compatible with both data sources. We are aiming to have it back up and running by the end of next weekend. Until then, please support @inthenow on his manual pulls.

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