Last month we published an article telling you about some of the upcoming changes to the public API that we host at api.steemit.com. Today we would like to announce one additional item to those set of changes. These changes will all go live as soon as 7 days from now (2019-01-10 16:00:00 UTC). If you are an app developer who relies on api.steemit.com to support your app this can be considered additional time to both review the original set of changes and also to test your apps against these changes.
The get_account_votes method returns all votes made by an account since the beginning of time on the blockchain. For some accounts, this single call can return upwards of 20MB of data. Because of this, get_account_votes is an extremely inefficient way to regularly poll for vote history data and disk-backed instances cannot respond quickly enough to this method. For these reasons we will discontinue support for this method in our public API. In our review of utilization, we found that this method is not used very often and is not required by many apps.
For the few apps that do need this type of data, there is a much more efficient way to obtain it. The newer database_api.list_votes method allows you to specify a limit for votes returned and also allows you to start at a particular post. Documentation for this method has been recently added to our developer portal and is available here.
If you are a Steem app developer who relies on our public API, you should review our previous post about the upcoming API changes and pay special attention to whether you are using the soon-to-be-deprecated get_account_votes method. Our developer portal continues to be an excellent reference and feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.
The Steemit Team
