[IDEA/BOUNTY] Steem Archive - view a historical version of Steemit

in steem •  8 years ago  (edited)

Earlier today I read about Steemer @blueorgy getting hacked. Hacks are sadly still a common occurence on the platform, until security practices are improved. The hacker vandalized @blueorgy's account by editing one of his posts to nonsense.

Thanks to posts being forever stored on the Steem blockchain, I was able to recover his original post. However, it took me quite a bit of effort to do so. What I pretty much did was digging through the blockchain with a python script.

While there exist things like the Google Cache or web.archive.org, they are not reliable, especially for new posts.

That got me thinking, what we really need is a Steem Web-site that shows historical versions of a particular post (or even the whole website) by walking through the blockchain in reverse!

As far as I'm aware, none of the existing sites like steemd.com, SteemStream.com or SteemStats.com have this feature.

Now, I am not a web developer myself (not a good one anyway), but I'm willing to put up a bounty of 50% of the Steem Dollars that this post earns for the person that can make it happen. You know, on top of the eternal glory, fame, and more Steem Dollars that you will earn for announcing your website!

Anyone interested?

#steem #steemit #steemstats #programming #blockchain #security

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!
Sort Order:  
  ·  8 years ago (edited)

@dantheman, @ned, is this something that the official Steemit.com site could provide? For one's own posts at least? That would be even better :)

Very good idea.

Knowing that you already have some experience with digging into old content, could you write an article describing how you did that?

Also I am very carious about when exactly posts are saved to blockchain. Just after I will click "Post"? I can edit post, but not forever (someone told me, that this is a matter of first payout). Do you have any knowledge about how this works?

Well, I used this script, it is far from optimal and takes a bit of guessing to know what block you need to start at (not sure how to translate a block number to a timestamp).

Obviously, there are some improvements needed. I am still fairly new at working with Steem.

from piston.steem import Steem

steem = Steem()
search = "@blueorgy/to-upvote-yourself-or-not-to-upvote-yourself-when-why-and-if-its-a-good-idea"
for c in steem.stream_comments(start=3361525):
    if c.identifier == search:
        print("title: " + c.title)
        print("post body: \n")
        print(c.body)
        break
    else:
        print("...")

Also I am very carious about when exactly posts are saved to blockchain. Just after I will click "Post"? I can edit post, but not forever (someone told me, that this is a matter of first payout). Do you have any knowledge about how this works?

Every time you click Post or Update Post the results are stored in the blockchain.