If you guys been following me, you will know I seldom/never rant about stuff on steemit, but today I will whine a little bit about it.

It took me a while to write all these, and at the point of writing I am really tired and a little bit disappointed.

These is all my personal point of view, and it is not perspective of anyone or any community.

The last update on stephard bot is a month ago, and there is not much time that I had to work on this project. This project has come a long way from version 1, a simple bot just to delete spam message on post promo, until now, a full feature post-promo bot.

What is stephard bot?

Stephard bot is a discord bot in #teammalaysia channel. User can share their post in the channel. To ensure that user not abusing these channel, a bot is used to automate the task of the moderator. User will be rewarded with upvotes. This project started back in January 2018.

How far has stephard come?

Version 1

A basic discord bot that prevent post promo based on discord old messages.

In version 1, stephard will check discord messages on that channel, and delete if a person shared a post on post promo without waiting for their cooldown period.

Version 2

Integrated database to prevent abuse.

Since the previous approach are stateless (no database involved), user can simply just delete the old messages and share it again. A database is introduced and the previous abuse is resolved.

This version of bot is also used by @qurator.

Version 3

Added upvote feature with trailing.

This feature was started by testing, I personally delegated to @superoo7-dev, to reward all the author on #teammalaysia that shared their post on discord.

Here is where all the abuse started.......

When dealing with these community upvotes, you had to force to add in some hard coded rules to prevent people to abuse it.

At that point of time, I added these rules:

only steemit links
post cannot be voted/flag by @cheetah
post age must be between 30 minutes and 3.5 days
post must have the tag of #teammalaysia

Then, the abuse came in, people tends to write short post like DMania and Steepshot, and wanted to get community upvotes.

I have nothing against dmania and steepshot, and I do use these 2 awesome platform.

So, I added a rule post must have more than 120 words.

Also, I had to fixed a bug that the bot doesn't understand Chinese words, and remove links and images for the word count.

Then, there are people literally just dumped links and run on discord, so I added another rule share at least 10 words synopsis about ur post alongside with the links.

I guess remove images and the message needs to have a synopsis really started a lot of ranting from everyone, but hey be considerate, I am the only developer, and I try to improve the bot as I can.

Version 4

Added pending review, moderator and sponsor feature

Since, the automated way doesn't work as I suppose. I need to add in moderator features, to ban someone who abused the system, and manually approved some of the pending post.

Then, a lot more abused happens... I guess I won't be sharing about how the abuse happen until I fix it.

What's the problem?

Problem 1: Time

As I am the only developer for the project, and there is a lot of school work, freelance work and also development work for steemit, I often find myself really busy and not getting enough rest. I wish there are more developers joining.

In addition to that, I need to spend countless time maintaining the servers, pay for the servers, dealing with database being hacked.

Problem 2: Source Code

This project started as a small project (~100 lines of codes), until now, which is around 10 files and more than 8000 lines of codes, the project needs to have a rewrite, to make it more scalable, easier to debug and easier to be understand by other developers. Recently, I just done rewriting StatBot, which took me almost a week. Since I stated in the previous point, I really don't have much time.

Problem 3: Abusers

Alright here is the problems, no matter what I did, it seems like the development speed will never be faster than the abuser, and when I try to solved the abuser issue, a new problem arises from the existing users (just some of them).

When the abuser abused the upvotes system, then there is a need to unvote those abusers posts, making it a double work. I am also on the trail of #teammalaysia, and sadly I had to unvote some of the abuser's post.

The abusers will find all the possible ways to abuse a system, which I really have no time to deal with it. So I am asking everyone to help out until I resolved the issues (check How can we improve section).

Problem 4: Engagement

If you ever promoted a post in the community, it seems like everyone are on discord just to post promo, no engagement between the community. Some even rant about not getting the trail upvotes from the community.

I understand the fact that discord are not friendly to those new users, but at least do join us on the community radio or jump in for a small discussion with everyone, don't just dump links and run away.

I personally had been reading a lot of posts in the channel and gave out tips using @tipu. I guess this is what I can do to help out everyone.

How can we improve as a community

I guess here are some improvement that we can made together as a community.

Engage with the community in discord, don't come in the discord dumped your post and leave.
Read others posts on post promo if possible, and have some engagement, upvote or comment. I personally really like the qurator and the steem engine post promo channel, at least there are engagement between everyone.
If you got ban, there might be a certain reason. Stop asking when can we unban you, I won't be doing it until I resolved all the updates on bots.
Report abuse if someone did it.
If you read a post that is worth sharing from the post promo channel, maybe you can DM the moderator about it, and they will make a compilation of great post.
Shared post on post promo that does not involved topics like politics, hatred, nsfw, scam, multi-level marketing, promoting an ICO and etc.

When will be the update on Stephard

It's hard to say, but I will tried my best. I had an assignment to submit tomorrow, and a few quizzes coming next week, so the update might take more than a week or two.