Can't help but feel that these inactive witnesses >30d should automatically be removed from the witness list and the witness vote automatically returned to the account that voted for them.
Is this something that has been discussed with the current developers? That's a long list of inactive witnesses and confusing to people who don't understand witnesses or governance here...
thank you for your observation, we believe too that not having an updated list of witnesses is not very effective for the whole community
Exactly! It also means that other active witnesses who are not in the top 100 don't get a chance because they are buried underneath a load of inactive ones.
We need to have a variety and options with our witness votes in my opinion but when there's quite a few "stale", "disabled" or not the current version of software being run, it will confuse anyone.
Definitely a "tidy up" needed there but have no idea how that would be implemented as I'm not a coder/developer.
Yes i agree. i am listed as rank 242 in that list, but active rank 157, although even that active rank is incorrect too, because there are witnesses running steem forks that are still listed above me. Now that we've forked to hive surely we need to change the ranks?
Yeah for sure! Well fingers crossed it gets looked at after this upcoming Hard Fork I saw mentioned and it's added to the "to-do" list on the next one. Especially after all the community came together to vote for witnesses prior to the Hive fork, I think it's pretty relevant now to tidy that list up.
+1 on this.
If a witness is inactive for 30+ days he is either dead, in hospital or disabled the witness permanently in 90% of all cases.
Returning the vote is also agod idea because of inertia.
Ha, yeah it could be any number of reasons but I think there needs to be a "cut off" - as the original post said, it must be so disheartening for a new witness running the latest version to see there's people who've been inactive for 18 months or more that is higher up than them!
Needs to be tidied up for sure but no idea how to go about asking for these changes to be made.
No worries. Quochuy is a dev and probably a lot of other devs read his posts. I bet they already know this issue but it is not a priority atm because the first HIVE Hardfork is about to be done and has to be tested.
This should be a quick fix for one of the subsequent hardforks.
Thanks for the info about the next HF. I know there's a lot more pressing issues at hand right now so happy to wait for these first important issues to be addressed and tested then looking in to other matters after.
For always up to date info about HIVE, check the HIVE discord server.
https://discord.gg/nKmuPH
Unfortunately I'm not a blockchain developer. Maybe @netuoso can give us some light on the topic.
Probably the simplest/easiest solution will be to introduce voting decay after some period of time.
For example, old votes start to decay after one year, then decay to zero after some time, say one month (the decay period is just to give voters some time adjust to avoid unexpected effects if a large vote starts to decay). This idea was discussed back at last SteemFest, and seemed to get general approval. It'll probably go up for general discussion after the upcoming HF.
Just need to wrap my head around that. So with this vote decay method, it would work as follows:
If my understanding is right, that seems reasonable although I think the 1 year period should be reduced to at least 6 months, maybe even 3 months. A witness needs to be "on the ball" with keeping the chain steady and have the latest consensus version running don't they? So 3 months should be enough time to have servers set up? I don't know, just asking the questions here 😃
The time period would be from when the vote is cast, not from when the witness last produced a block. In practice, the more general concern is that of inattentive voters (or ones that can't change their votes either because they lost their keys or because they died without passing them on to someone, aka "dead stake" voting). One year might be too long, and 6 months might be better, but it would put more pressure on voters to deal with updating their votes every 6 months or so.
Ah ok, yep, I see now, thanks for clarifying.
I'd say 6 months is probably the shortest time and 1 year is probably the max time with this. Meet in the middle at 9 haha.
I guess then the next pinch point would be how you'd notify someone with regard to their witness vote assuming the user is still active. Having a notification/comment like what Hivebuzz does with its comment notifications could be useful but if it's done with each witness vote and someone votes 30 witnesses in quick succession, could get annoying/spammy.
Perhaps just a one off notification every 9 months to say "review your witness votes" or words to that effect.
It could be decayed from last vote made. So for example, if you vote or unvote anyone, then the decay time to could be reset for all your votes. This makes the tacit assumption that when you vote for any witness, you've given some thought to your existing witness votes.
Yeah I like that idea and think it would work a lot better. There'll always have to be some assumptions made but with this approach, if someone is moving a witness vote around, they must have grasped at least a basic concept of governance and witness voting on Hive.
Is this idea/proposal something that will be brought up after the upcoming Hard Fork? Be good to brainstorm this and get some additional ideas.
This is a great suggestion. Additionally I also thought that it would have been great if all the witness votes were reset during the birth of Hive and a fresh vote was made. It would have been a fresh start for the witnesses.
There have been several discussions on similar topics in the past but I'm not sure what is the latest decision. What I remember is automated witness vote removal can lead to security issues.
What do you mean by security issues? In the sense that it would cause disruption to the chain or it leaves a possible "breach" for someone's account to get hacked or something else?
That's a great idea, and thus we can make the list more organised.
Yeah it does need a tidy up and would be a better reflection of who's currently active and supporting the running of the most up to date chain outside the top 20.
There are many aspects. One of the old discussion https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/953
Hmmm, I had a read through and I think that one thing needs to be addressed at a time and test it scientifically - looks like there's common agreement about the need to tidy up the disabled witnesses though and this "decaying vote" seems to be the most popular option at the moment.
We'll probably be continuing the discussion after this next Hard Fork 24 that I've seen mentioned.
Anything touching governance needs to be thoroughly thought and tested
Definitely agree with that, particularly in light of recent events!
That's correct