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As a steem early adopter and sometimes top19 witness, I feel I should be doing what I can to help grow the platform and support new users.

In the early days I sponsored a steemit adoption initiative and inspired the legendary @xeroc in helping fund development of the rss feed capability in Streemian which is in beta right now.

I’ve also been doing my bit for curation by using my stake to highlight new users and interesting content, but as many others have found, it can be quite a time intensive activity and so I’ve been trying to find a good curation bot that I can use to help with my voting, but it seems that most curation bots in use are closed-source.

Today - I’d like to highlight the work of another great, but yet undiscovered developer in the steemit ecosystem - @kefkius and his work developing the open source curation bot - steemvote.

Steemvote 0.3 Released by @kefkius

Steemvote, now in it's 3rd iteration - now has a GUI option, author priority and a powerful new feature called delegated voting.

Delegated voting does what is says! Allows you to follow-vote a curator who you trust

Delegates can be used to support some of the great community curation project in play such as Project Curie and RobinHoodWhale putting your stake to good work 24x7.

With a little bit of effort, this feature can also be used to negate spam or abusive down voting.

Taking on the nuclear engineer with steemvote

I recently became aware of an issue where an abusive user @r4fken was flagging new users posts for no other reason than to annoy them and thus hurt the whole steemit platform. You can see what sort of effect this was having (and still is having) from this example new user post @punjammies/getting-flagged-for-a-poem-and-introducing-myself that r4fken down-voted.

Like many others I let @ned know about the issue - but decided to do my bit as well by customising steemvote to upvote any new post which @r4fken had down-voted. Thus ensuring that not only has @r4fken’s down-vote been negated but the poster would get a little reward.

Python Rocks!

If you are at all interested in understating how the steem blockchain works, how to interact it with using @xeroc’s Piston API, then have a go at setting up steemvote with a local steem node - you’ll learn a lot.

@kefkius is on steemit chat, very approachable and more than happy to help.

I'd like to thank @kefkius for developing his open source bot and inspiring me to learn a bit about python, discover Pycharm (free multi-platfrom python IDE) and of course delve into the guts of @xeroc’s awesome piston API.

I’ll be sending any rewards for this post to @kefkius to support his continued development of steemvote - but I’d encourage you to up vote his v0.3 announcement directly if you’d like to support his work.