Five things to do before you hardfork

Hardfork 20 is coming - some witnesses have already started running the code - and it's going to change a few things about how Steem works. These are a few things you might want to do before the hardfork comes.

Change your autovotes to fifteen minutes.

Votes before a post is fifteen minutes old will now have a portion of their curation rewards destroyed, where they were previously given to the author. That means voting before fifteen minutes will now give up a chunk of your vote's value, so you shouldn't do it. (It may also discourage future voters.)

On the flipside, the penalty for voting between fifteen and thirty minutes will be removed, so there's no longer reason to vote later, either.

This is a payout calculation change, so it will apply to posts made on Tuesday after 15:00 UTC.¹ Don't wait for the hardfork for this one.

Remove small votes from autovoters and curation trails

Hardfork 20 will institute a very small tax on all votes as part of the new system of switching from bandwidth to resource credits. 50,000 rshares is a very, very small number, but if you're someone who is regularly voting in small amounts you may see a large chunk of those votes disappear to the tax. Evaluate your trails and your autovotes accordingly. A good rule of thumb is that the percentage of vote you cast should be at least the percentage of your SP equal to 5 SP. (So if you have 100 SP don't vote less than 5%.)

Like the above, this is a payout calculation change and will affect posts made on Tuesday and later.

Create any new accounts you might want

Currently account creation is free: it costs three Steem, but that converts into three SP in the new account. Under HF20 the three Steem will be burned. It may or may not be possible to create free accounts with no SP through the larger dApps, depending on demand, but we know this system works, so if you have the Steem and you think you might want a new account, now is the time.

@thedarkhorse has a good tutorial on how to create an account under the current system here.

Vote down and delegate

After HF20 in order to delegate SP you will have to have enough voting power to transfer it with 100% VP to the new account. Currently it goes to the new account with 100% VP without checking, so if you're delegating you can vote down from your own account first, then delegate and vote it again from the second account. If you're planning to delegate soon anyway it may be a good idea to do it before the hardfork and use this advantage.

Power down and vote

Currently during the week after you've initiated a power down, you're still able to vote with the power that will be withdrawn in the first week. This will be taken away in HF20 - the voting power from a week's worth of power down will go away at the start of the week instead of at the end when the payout happens. So if you want to do a week's worth of power down, this is the time to do it, while you still get value for that week worth of SP.

Those last two are things Steemit Inc. decided to fix because they consider them exploits, so if that bothers you, don't do them.