I'm having @catweasel do ours now. We kind of got side-tracked yesterday. You know him. If the refrigerator starts calling his name, I have to round him up again.
I'm astonished at how many times you've upvoted the account -- using the comments in addition to the group post itself. That's extremely generous. I've recently commandeered the TDWS comment from Cw, so I can start doing that too. (I wish Steem would rise so my vote would be worth something again. Honest, I do. Lord, this is depressing.)
Contrary to some recent implications, I don't just sit and "keep books" on the various member accounts. It was just that our group posts have been getting such miserable payouts lately (and all of a sudden.) I decided to look into what had changed, because doing several hours of work a night for a < $3.50 payout on an account I don't even own was really starting to bruise my morale. Especially when you consider that Ethan's vote alone makes up a quarter of that total.
In the beginning, we got more than 10x that amount and were growing nicely. Of course, Steem was really booming and people were excited, etc. But these miserable payouts with more than 100 votes on the account (and more than 150 group members, as you've noted) were really bumming me out. Especially when I found people giving 150% like you and some generous others ... and some then wanting rewards who weren't giving much at all.
So I've tried to be as fair as I can to everyone because what I just described ... wasn't.
The first thing I do when I see the notice from the Whistle Stops is click the upvote button and then I try and respond with a comment if I have the time. I have always felt that I need to support the group any way I can and I just don't understand why everyone doesn't feel the same way, an up vote costs a person nothing to make. To me it shows that there was at least some appreciation but like I said, I watched for about a week straight a while back and not one person on several days upvoted the Whistle Stops even though they were featured in it.
I wonder if it is because some folks have so many groups they belong to and this might be as not as an important group to them?
Thanks for following the suggestion on the SBI share, I think it might be a good thing to consider going forward as a "one time" initiation fee or even an application fee at sign up.
It will be interesting to see how many folks actually step up and donate a share since the suggestion has been made . I have received some responses that people have done so, so that is encouraging but no where near the numbers I would like to see yet.