SteemPress 1.4: Update on new features, current collaborations, voting and new Discord moderators

In today's post, we'll be giving an update on new features that have been added over the last 3 weeks, as well as explaining a change we have made to how @steempress-io votes by trailing different community accounts. Finally, we will also introduce 4 new moderators who we are happy to be adding to our ranks as our user base and community continues to grow. We are currently at 1865 users and quickly approaching a total of 200 000 posts made with SteemPress!

SteemPress 1.4 is here together with different changes made to our voting bot!

Updates (version 1.4) :

• Fixed the bug where some characters were converted in the title ("<" was converted in "<" for instance)

• Option to have the featured image of your post automatically added to the of your post on Steem.

  ​ For some posts, automatically adding the featured image to the top of the post on Steem makes it look a lot better, while for some users it could result in posting the image twice. This change will allow the user to choose the setting best suited to their posts.

• Customized filters for which categories SteemPress will or will not publish to Steem.

  ​ Some users have expressed that they only want to cross-post certain topics that they write about to the Steem blockchain, whilst not posting other categories. This option allows the user to save which tags will not get cross-posted by SteemPress, as can be seen below:

SteemPress now provides a category filter for what topics SteemPress will ignore

• Customizable footers allowing you to easily add your own personal signature at the end of your Steem posts with a link back to your blog.

  ​ Previously, all SteemPress posts containing a link back to the original article in the footer of the post on Steem included the default text "Posted from my blog with SteemPress". With many users requesting the ability to make their own customized footers, SteemPress now offers this option:

• Some ground work to allow us to more easily debug formatting issues, don't hesitate to send us links to post and explain us what's the problem.

• Voting bot changes to allow having more "voting rounds" with a flexible voting distribution to avoid overspending voting power on trails and tips.

  ​ Previously, our voting bot would trail different accounts with a set voting percentage. While this meant that the different communities could know what vote @steempress-io would trail their votes with, it also meant that when multiple votes were cast at the same time it would drain our voting power and result in other users having a far lower chance to receive a tip. To solve this, our trailing and tip votes are now dynamic and set to only use a given percentage of our voting power in each round. This should result in a higher chance for other writers to receive a tip whilst still allowing us to give out sizable trailing votes.

Update on collaborations

Over the past month, we've been contacted by countless communities, projects and individuals wanting to collaborate with us in one form or another. As one of our objectives is to help connect WordPress bloggers with Steem communities and contribute to new business development around the Steem blockchain, we are always eager to see how we can work with different Steem communities, curation projects, dApps and other Steem-based projects. In this post, we will give a short summary of the current communities we trail and also some projects we have supported.

Current trails on Steem communities and curation projects

With an increasing number of users asking us how they can obtain a higher vote from @steempress-io than what they are currently receiving, we would like to inform you which accounts we currently trail and also give an update on how we base our voting percentage.

Steem accounts we currently trail includes:

• @Curie
• @SteemSTEM
• @OCD
• @travelfeed
• @up-quark
• @bebeth
• @TheWritersBlock
• @steemitworldmap
• @sndbox

As stated in our announcement post, SteemPress aims to curate content partially through trailing the votes of qualified curation projects with a solid record of finding quality posts while making sure to avoid voting on plagiarist content or spam. We are still looking to add more Steem community accounts, curation projects, or active curators dedicated to discovering quality or undervalued content to the list of users that we trail. If you run such a project then do feel free to join our Discord server here and DM @fredrikaa or send an email to fredrik@steempress-io.

Hosting projects added to our Discord

As most of our Discord members will have noticed, we have added chat rooms dedicated to non-SteemPress projects including @vornix, @timeets.com and @xopus. After our announcement post, one of the most frequent question we received from steemians were how they could set up a WordPress website with the right hosting to be able to install and use SteemPress. Following that demand, we've seen at least three new community lead hosting services take form focusing on providing hosting for SteemPress blogs in particular.

@Vornix, @Timeets.com and @Xopus are independent hosting services complementing SteemPress, for more information you can contact them on our Discord server

We are happy to offer a platform and initial support to any projects we see as complementary to SteemPress and which offers added value to our users. We also hope that many sub-communities can succeed around the use and integration of SteemPress and benefit from us growing our user base and onboarding new people to the Steem blockchain.

New Discord moderators

Finally, we are extremely happy to see the continued growth of our Discord server which now has more than 1100 members. With the increased activity in many of our language sub-groups, and with many new SteemPress users writing content in other languages than English, we see a continued need to add new moderators covering different languages.

Please welcome our new set of moderators to the team:

• @Flaws (Spanish)
• @Elocuenciadsnuda (Spanish)
• @Irfandogan (Turkish)
• @Chuuuckie (Filipino)

With our Spanish community growing very fast and attracting a lot of diverse content creators, we decided on having two moderators speaking that language. This to ensure that there is a proper representation of the Spanish speaking community, that there is a consistent presence of a Spanish speaking moderator and to assist our curators in evaluating new Spanish writers.

That's it for this update! Again, a big thank you to everyone who continues to support SteemPress and to our users who provide ideas, suggestions, feedback and reports of bugs or abuse.

And as always, SteemPress on!
@fredrikaa and @howo

To use SteemPress, you can download it from the WordPress plug-in store here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress