The referee system has now been in place for roughly two months. This program has been an overwhelming success with spam and abuse being dealt with regularly. That being said there were issues with the system pointed out very early in its existence. We are happy to announce we have a solution for these that we feel will empower the #sportstalk community while still allowing for regular abuse prevention.
The main issue we had was that referees had been only selected by a single person. This leads to an issue where the group is primarily only users that one person had vetted which limited who served. This leads to a lower participation rate and other issues like language barriers between the referee team and our users. This is not to mention that it leaves full control in one person’s hands when it comes to removing who is serving as a referee and replacing them.
Fortunately we have a solution that will still allow a team to serve as our referees but they will no longer have one person deciding who serves in these roles. We believe that power should belong to the community. That’s why starting on December 1, 2019 the referee team will begin to be selected by an election held within the community.
Referees serve the role of combating abuse within the #sportstalk ecosystem. If they downvote a piece of content then that means they feel that it violated our community’s guidelines for some reason and that it’s rewards should be removed.
If a post is visited by multiple referees then action begins to happen. If five referees downvote a post that will trigger a downvote from 
To decide who will serve as our next 9 referees we’ve created a new system on the Steem blockchain that will record votes on chain to track referee approvals. Each user will be able to head over to https://referee.sportstalk.social/ where they can cast 1 vote for who they’d like to become the next referee. Once their vote is cast the total of their SPORTS POWER will be assigned to their selected candidate. (This does not affect your usage of SPORTS voting and is simply for voting within the
As December 1st approaches we will take a snapshot of the voting and the top 9 accounts based on SPORTS POWER votes will become the next SportsTalk Referees. These referees will then serve for roughly two weeks with the election snapshots being taken on the 1st and 15th of each month to determine if referees will be replaced with newly elected accounts.
Voting is handled on chain via json entries within the Steem blockchain. Casting your ballet is as simple as just 5 easy steps.
1.) Vist https://referee.sportstalk.social/
2.) Click ‘Vote’ on the top menu
3.) Enter your Steem account name
4.) Enter the name of the account you’d’ like to vote for
5.) If you have Steem Keychain, or a compatible wallet, installed then you will be able to cast your vote via a Keychain prompt. If you do not have Keychain installed or are visiting from a device where keychain isn’t available then the system will create a Steemconnect link for you to sign to your account.
It may take a moment for your vote to show on the website. We’ve set the website to refresh the data feed every so often so if you don’t immediately see your vote populating you should be able to check back in a few minutes to see it recorded.
Anyone can serve as a referee. It first takes the community of SPORTS holders to approve you but other than that there’s little it takes to register to become one. Before seeking votes we have a few suggestions we’d like to provide that will help referees be successful in their roles.
The first suggestion is to use an account you can perform the duties with. Being a referee requires you to issue many downvotes within the same day thus burning a lot of voting power just for downvotes. Since referees are just signaling accounts for
We also think it will be wise for referees to create a post using the tag #electref that details what they view as abuse. This will go a long way towards helping the community know who is running but also what they are running for. It will also help the community know to vote for one account over voting for your traditional Steem account.
With the changes to a dynamic group of referees we've temporarily removed the penalty box as a referee responsibility. This will be something we review in the future to see if it can be added back in to support their mission.
