FOSSbot Voter v0.3.2! Comments feature and important bug fixes

I'm really happy to release this version of FOSSbot Voter, there is some great stuff in v0.3.2 😎

Thanks to everyone who supports this project and gets excited about using it. I'm privileged to have such a nice community around it of suggesters, testers and users.

Don't forget that if you find a problem the best thing to do is open a ticket, I generally respond soon. But don't expect any customer support, it's a hobby grade project. There are docs too.

Upgrading

To upgrade (or install for the first time) follow the installation and migration guide. You're going to want to do a clean install I think, the DB should be reset for best results.

New Features

Comment on voted posts

This was definitely the most requested feature so I'm very pleased to deliver it to you. You are now able to set the bot to post a comment on every post you up vote.

To use it, you need to do two things:

1. enable it in Edit Config by checking the box at COMMENT_ENABLED, and press Update.
2. write your comment into the box in Edit Algo, and don't forget to save

While this is something that a lot of people want, not everyone wants it for a purpose I agree with. In my opinion you should only use this if you have something useful to comment with your votes, for example if the bot is running on a community account, a trail, or something like that.

People are probably going to use this to spam people, unsolicited ads, vote begging and other not nice things. It's not up to me how you use it, but I encourage you to think about it and be responsible. That is also for your own sake - most people don't like spam and you may get downvoted.

Bug Fixes

Stats not loading, and general web app not loading

Since the increase of volume on the Steem blockchain it has become unreasonable to keep all the information on all the posts the bot processes in the internal database. Many of you are processing very high volumes of posts and it was filling up your databases with useless information.

However it's still good to review what the bot decides to vote on, and what it doesn't, so in this release I've put a limit on the amount of detailed information kept per bot run, and limited how many runs to keep.

You'll find two new config vars for this:

• POST_METADATA_MAX_RECORD_PER_RUN: defaults to 100, the number of posts to keep information on
• POST_METADATA_MAX_RUNS_TO_KEEP: defaults to 5, the number of previous bot runs to keep detailed information about

Note that this does not affect the summary of posts voted on, all voted on posts information is kept for a few days, depending on what you set DAYS_KEEP_LOGS config var too.

Fix accounts not fetching

This is a big one too. For the last few releases many author metrics have not been working as the accounts for those authors were not being fetched correctly. This also affected the white and black lists.

Accounts are now fetching correctly. Please note that the accounts information are stored in memory and there can be many thousands of accounts fetched, so if you notice your bot failing you might need to decrease the number of posts you are scanning in a bot run with the config var MAX_POST_TO_READ

Double processing posts

After the Mongo DB update there was an issue with saving the last processed post, which went unnoticed. It meant that the bot would read many more posts than it needed to, wasting resources, and also double process those posts.

This has been fixed now, the last post is saved and the bot doesn't go any further than that. Anyone who runs the bot at high frequency will notice that bot runs take a lot shorter time. One tester was alarmed by this and thought it wasn't processing the posts but don't be alarmed, it is working correctly. However please report any bugs if there are any you find.

Other small issues

There were a few small UI issues.

• Algorithm not updating immediately after change
• Config variable not updating correctly in some cases

Additionally there are couple of known but unresolved issues testers and I are still observing, but they do not seem to affect many users so they probably won't impact you.

Additional note

Many people are setting MAX_POST_TO_READ too high. You should not set it higher than about 4000 posts. There usually isn't enough resources to cover anything higher on a small cloud platform unless you are running the bot on good gear. The strategy should be to run it more often instead.

Contributions and next steps

I'm the only developer on this project 😅 My next task is some much needed code maintenence so if you're disgusted by the code you should hopefully be less sad after the clean up soon.

In particular I'm want to work on:

• migrating the interface to React
• use modern Javascript
• improve server
• break out metric engine

If any of that sounds like fun, get in touch.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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