It’s no secret now. For over 3 weeks, SBD-USD peg was broken and SBD rates skyrocketed to moon. But did you know that this also made @yabapmatt’s popular Steem Bot Tracker tool go haywire?

Well, let me confess that the Steem Upvote Bot Tracker tool was a boon for me along with all bidders in several ways:

• It brought transparency by revealing the total no. & value of bids at any given moment.
• It made the calculation for ROI damn easy.
• It even had an option to factor in the Curation Reward value in the vote value of the bots to exactly see what you finally get.
• Maximum Profitable Bid figure saved all the calculations you needed to transfer the right amount for a profitable upvote.
• It helped to track all bidding bots on a single page which made profitability comparison easier.
• It also displayed the key terms and conditions of the bots like Minimum Bid Value, voting on comments or not, terms for refund of invalid bids, availability of more upvotes by the existence of pre-vote / front-runner groups and many more parameters.

But yes, it missed on an important parameter about the max age of the post acceptable to the bot.

• It also listed several other bots and content promotion services on the same page.

Thus it was an excellent tool of utmost value for all those users who availed the services of these bots and above all, it was (and is) open source and free tool. Thus it commanded more reliability in the community. Everyone (except some bot operators) were thankful to @yabapmatt to conceive such a versatile tool.

Unfortunately, it’s no more the same now! I’d like to caution everyone using this tool to NOT to trust it’s functionality as before. Since I wrote about its failure to calculate upvote value when bots were being paid in Steem, in one of my previous posts viz. Don’t Use Paid Upvote Bots Right Now, the tool was later edited to include the value of Steem in calculating the upvote value of the bots. An icon too was placed against the bot name to show that it was accepting Steem in addition to SBD.

But this software seems to be malfunctioning for some parameters. Even when it functions perfectly, it’s interface is no more easy to understand for most people, which doesn’t help them decide on their bidding amount. Therefore, I’d like to point out following things to pay special attention to:

• Always “Include 25% curation rewards in Max Profitable Bid calculation:” to “ON” mode. Why wouldn’t anyone do that!
• You have got 4 options to choose “Display Currency”. (i) USD, (ii) SBD, (iii) STEEM & (iv) POST REWARDS (What is shown on steemit.com). And this is where all the confusion began. The number of parameters now overwhelm an average user and killed that easy to understand interface in its earlier version. But again this was necessitated with the current market scenario.
• The biggest confusion is about the $ sign. This sign is used for depicting the value in USD as well as the SBD equivalent value shown on posts on Steem chain. Esp. note the difference when checking Total Bid Value on the tool page and at “Details” page. You will see a different value in both places if you set the Display Currency at Post Rewards settings. The one shown on Details page is in USD and the one shown on the main page is in SBD (as on Steem potential post rewards figure).
• Another confusion area is in ascertaining the value of $ figure shown on potential post rewards. This tool assumes that you have set your rewards on a 50-50 split. So it will incur you a huge loss in case you have set your post rewards on 100% power up mode. This tool doesn’t take that into consideration.
• One more way to get confused is about the value of potential post rewards. The blockchain values 1 Steem = $3.25 SBD (often displayed with a $ sign) whereas in the open market 1 STEEM = $3.25 USD (approx.). But since according to blockchain SBD is pegged with USD, 1 Steem = $3.25 SBD = $3.25 USD. But this is NOT the case right now. So when you split your post rewards in 50% SBD & 50% Steem, you in effect pay about $ 30 USD (@market rate of 9.25 USD per SBD). This loss should be taken care of while making your bid to finally turn it into a profitable deal.
• In Details section “Total Vote Value” and “Total Bid Value” both have got the same $ sign, when you have set the Display Currency on Post Rewards. But this ($) sign has a different meaning in each case. So you need to be extra careful of it.
• The units for “Total Bid Value” on main tool page are different from the one shown in Details page unless you have set the USD as your Display Currency. Do take a note of it, esp. when you set the Display Currency as Post Rewards. However, it doesn’t make any sense as bids are always placed either in SBDs or Steem and you can, at most, calculate them in USD equivalent but converting them to Post Reward figure is utter bullshit. However, that’s how this software is configured. So don’t get confused by it.
• Another problem area to understand is ROI calculation. Check this image here:

Here you will notice that on bidding 1 SBD, the bidder received a vote for $2.47. That seems about 247% of the amount paid. Still the tool shows only 2.85% return after curation. Now this is the beauty of this tool and every bidder should understand the intricacies involved in calculating the actual profit. Here I’m elaborating on it:

Payment made = 1 SBD = 9.07 USD (Market rate)
Bot Upvoted = $ 2.47
Less: 25% Curation i.e. -0.6175
Actual Payout = 2.47 – 0.6175 = $1.8525
At 50-50 split, you get 0.9265 SBD + (0.9265/3.21) STEEM (Blockchain rate 1 STEEM = 3.21 SBD)
i.e. 0.9265 SBD + 0.9265 USD worth of Steem
i.e. 0.9265X 9.07 USD + 0.9265 USD (Market rate of 1 SBD = 9.07 USD)
= 9.3275875 USD
Less: Capital invested i.e. 1 SBD = 9.07 USD
Net Profit = 9.3275875 – 9.07 USD = 0.2575875 USD
ROI = 0.2575875 X 100 / 9.07 = 2.84%

This is the net return you get on your investment after taking all the risk of bidding, time and effort and wait for post payout.

So in effect, getting a 2.5 times return upvote isn’t worth that much. Do you think all these effort and risk to pay a bidding upvote bot is worth with such meagre returns? In fact, when apparently it looks like you are making a 2x return, you are actually making a loss on your investment. Unfortunately, the creator of this amazing tool don't think so! Check the discussion of a victim with @yabapmatt here:

A Note To @Yabapmatt

Mr @yabapmatt! Receiving a 2x vote doesn't mean that money invested was doubled. Your response to the user above is very insensitive and illogical. I don't expect such a rude response from a person who is running a Witness to this blockchain. Since I had vote you up for the Witness, I'm interested in more details. And I contacted this user to get further details of his communication with the creator of Steem Bot Tracker tool. Here is what I got:

To know more detail about this, here's the complete story by the victim himself.

The tool developer carelessly put all the responsibility on the tool user. He says the tool has enough disclaimers and warnings that you do your own due diligence. I'll like to bring to your attention that the Tool website claims "Vote values shown on this site are ESTIMATES based on the available information at the current time." Now estimates can render a reasonable error of a few percentage points. IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT A 3X FIGURE WILL BECOME 2X FIGURE. It's NOT an estimate, it's CHEATING! And you say that the user is still complaining after getting a 2x vote? Holy shit! If someone commits you that you will get 3x return and you receive only 2x, do you still consider it a fair deal? How come it's fair? If that's fair then what's a scam to you? You seems to accept that your tool commits such errors and still don't do anything to correct it. You expect the users who are cheated by it should abandon using it in future! Why don't you get that tool down if you can't make it work reasonably?

The problem could also be with the bot operator and bot may have voted outside the bidding window or something but since @yabapmatt seems to accept such things happen with his tool, I think it's his responsibility to clarify the situation and to take measures to avoid such issues in future.