I don't usually do witness updates as I am very active in the community and approachable. With Hard Fork 24 approaching, I think this is a good time to let everyone know how things are going.
I am currently signing approval for Hard Fork 24 and running latest 1.24.2 version. I am also running hard fork 23 nodes as a precaution.
I am in full support of Hard Fork 24 and looking forward to it becoming active. While this hard fork may not look super exciting, it is a critical step moving forward.
Hard Fork 24 contains three major improvements.
While there is nothing shiny in this update that will change your day to day interaction with Hive, it is important to the scalability and stability of Hive and prepares us for more flashy improvements like SMTs.
I recommend checking out 
As you likely already know, the hard fork is scheduled for October 6th.
As always, a lot of my time is devoted to finding and preventing spam, plagiarism, and abuse. I do this by providing a blacklist api that is used by most projects on Hive, researching and detecting spam and abuse, removing rewards from spam and plagiarism.
In the future the Blacklist API will no longer be needed as the functionality will be supported natively on the blockchain with the introduction of decentralized lists. Once this is available, my main blacklist will be migrated and users can subscribe to it if they choose to. Other blacklists supported by the Global Blacklist API will have the option to do the same if they want their blacklist available to others. For the most part there are only two active blacklists, mine and Spaminator, for the most part others have been abandoned or are inactive.
I am preparing for the next STEMGeek's Hackathon. The first one was very successful and resulted in the creation of Hive Onboarding, an awesome project that makes signing up to Hive much easier.
The first Hackathon was an experiment and I was not sure what to expect for participation. We managed to raise over 12,000 Hive rewarding the top 3 entries. If you are interested in contributing to the prize pool this time around I will be posting details soon.
This time around I want to get more attention to the Hackathon from outside of Hive and will be looking at ways to accomplish that. If you have ideas or want to help, feel free to contact me on Discord or Keybase.
If you haven't seen 
In short, it is a bot that monitors Twitter and leaves comments for authors when their content is shared on Twitter. With the new Twitter Rich Embeds, the integration is fantastic.
In less than 25 days
I am looking at adding support for Reddit as well in a future update if I can find an efficient way to detect Hive content.
I have been giving some thought to starting Marky On Air weekly show back up. Let me know if it is something you want to happen. I have been thinking about potentially changing the topic and format of the show.
I always like to end my witness updates with something completely different.
I recently got my 3D printer back up and running, something I've been meaning to do for a long time but Steem/Hive has taken a lot of attention. I recently printed an Among Us crew member which I thought was pretty fun. You can remove the top of the body to kill him.
I still need to do some tweaking, but he came out pretty good. If you have a 3D printer and want to print one, the model is free on Thingiverse.
Securely chat with me on Keybase
