Shadowbot is not using Steemconnect, so you need to give them the posting key. That's all to sign up.
So I'm trying to cover everything that there is now, because they disabled a part of the dashboard (The bot should be working in the background), because there should be a new version coming soon.
After you logged in, you start with a shadow rank of 1 which will increase over time. The whole calculation is done over a formula found here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@shadowbot/voting-allocations-have-been-upgraded-critical-update
Basically: The higher the shadowrank the more votes you receive, the higher your SP the more votes you receive. The system should be mostly fair balanced. As far as i can tell, I'm receiving more than I'm able to contribute.
Also: Shadowbot is always casting votes when the VP reaches a 100%. You can see that perfectly at @grandpawhale and https://steemd.com/@grandpawhale . Grandpawhale is a big account signed in shadowbot, but never posting. His pool priority is through the roof based on that, pretty sure one post from him would receive most of the votes.
Furthermore: When the account does not reach the 100% VP, shadowbot will take a upvote every 5 hours from the account.
It is not a get rich quick scheme. It takes time to get things going.
Back to the disabled dashboard: The shadowrank is correct displayed, the pool priority, but not the earnings and contributions.
As far as I can tell: It brings more for a frequent poster to be in shadowbot then to sell the votes on smartmarket. I joined shadowbot right in the beginning back in January. because I wanted to make the most of the voting power and stumbled upon that bot. I received fairly quickly a payout of 0.32$ on my very first meme and that was mostly thanks to shadowbot. Selling my votes (14 SP) on smartmarket only yields me 0.001 SBD per vote sold, so roughly 0.01 SBD per day. I'm pretty sure that I'm receiving more with shadowbot.
(They have a follow for follow option, but it should be deactivated by default, also a automatic resteem feature, which can be activated, and an auto claim of rewards. But that's only extra features. I used the follow for follow only in the beginning, until I realized my Feed was useless thanks to the bots that followed me. Only using the claim rewards feature now.)
Very interesting! I am delegating much out and run a curation trail so cannot get onboard but will show this & your link to friends!