When I publish a new post on Steemit, I get really excited and check if my post is in hot or trending. I usually repeat this for every tag of my post and do it multiple times a day. Counting how high your post is in hot or trending is really really painful, so I decided to make our lifes easier… introducing TrendChecker!
What will it do for me?
This bot will go through a total of 1800 posts to detect if your post is within the top 100 in hot, trending or promoted. The bot will do this for all of your 5 tags and for the general hot/trending page.
How can I use TrendChecker?
I decided to not use any third-party software/ interface for the interaction between the user and the bot. It fully relies on the Steem Blockchain! With the amazing feature of feeless transactions, it is now possible to communicate for free with memos. So you just need to send me any amount of SBD or STEEM with the url of your post and the bot will check how high your post is in hot/… and it will send your money back with this new information as the memo.
- get the full url of your post
- send any amount of SBD/STEEM to @wil1liam
- wait for 30 seconds to get your reply
Video Showcase
How does it work?
For programming I used Python with the steem-python library. The bot runs on a raspberry pi in my home only plugged into LAN and power. The goal of this bot is to be up 24 hours and 7 days of the week and I will try my hardest to maintain it.
Speed and Usability
The Raspberry Pi is an amazing and affordable device. However, it is quite slow compared to real PCs or Gaming PCs. On my main Pc it took 10-20 seconds for the bot to send back the money and retrieve the information but on the Raspberry Pi it takes between 25 and 40 seconds to complete. For my taste this is not really instant anymore yet it is still lightning fast compared to other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
All in all, the bot should be able to handle a minimum of 2160 requests daily and I believe that is more than enough for the start.
Nevertheless, how could we make it faster? More computing power and maybe Discord as an interface… However, the easiest way to make it faster would be to let users run their own TrendChecker if they want to! Therefore, this bot will be completely Open Source under a MIT License and the code is available on Github.
Roadmap
I am currently working on a refund feature that lets users get their money back if the bot failed to process the transaction or just went down. In such cases you would need to send 0.001 SBD/ STEEM again with the memo “refund” and the bot would check its previous transaction history and send back every failed transaction. The only problem with this feature is that the bot is currently running on my main account and I do not want to risk any bugs that would result in sending my money to someone else.
I believe the information provided by the bot could be much more useful and interesting and could perhaps return some sort of personal statistics. You could deposit 0.005 SBD and get notified when your post reaches the top 5 of hot.
- create a standalone account for the bot if it becomes successful
- refund feature
- offer more statistics about your post
About me
I live in Germany and I am only 16 years old. Starting programming 2-3 years ago, I now develop bots,other stuff and post tutorials for Steemit <3. If I can do it, you can do it, too!
Please feel free to contribute to this project via GitHub pull requests and issues. If you want to contact me write me an E-Mail: [email protected]
Please try out TrendChecker for yourself and share any thoughts and feedback in the comments below. Have a great day!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Hi @wil1liam! You have received 0.1 SBD tip from @elizacheng!
@elizacheng wrote lately about: Makemesmile Week 4 Result / 第四期Makemesmile的抽奖成绩出炉了 Feel free to follow @elizacheng if you like it :)
I admire you!
Thanks for the memo request. I will surely send your money with some gift. Resteemed for more visibility and upvoted to show my support. Good luck with the roadmap. I hope to see an exclusive bot account soon. I think it is a fantastic idea and it will become a success. Set a minimum fee of 0.005 or more so that despite being cheap, it may bring you some SBD/Steem daily. ;)
PS: Please check if you can develop something like this.
Thanks for your support !! :) I'm currently planning to create a website where I can showcase my bots and maybe stuff from other developers. I totally believe that your idea is feasible and if I have the time I will try to do it. Furthermore, I saw someone suggesting a trending site without the bots and I think these two ideas could be combined easily .
I would love to earn some money with the bot but I believe there is quite a way to go because I would need much more users...
Happy to have you here :)
Love ya man! Best of luck!!!
This looks really interesting. I hope to one day have a practical use for it. Right now though none of my posts ever make it to "Hot" or "Trending" so I don't think I need to worry about it :)
One day you will make it to hot or trending :) and you will know what tool to use xD
Thanks, I appreciate it! I really hope so!
Well that is an interesting application that you made. I am amazed at what people think of doing using the STeem blockchain.
However wouldn't just be whales and bid bot users who would dominate the list? Sory noob question.
Thanks but I think you didn't understand it fully... It doesn't have a separate "list". The bot only returns the results from https://steemit.com/hot/.
@wil1liam - Appreciate your post & you going out of your way to make an automated Trend Checker, as you call it. But, if your results just come from the https://steemit.com/hot list- why can't I just look there to see what tags are trending? Just a simple question from a newbie.
yeah, you can but most of my post don't reach the top :( so I want to know how far they got...
@wil1liam -Is there anyway to adjust your app to track which posts jump from the hot page to the trending page. Not sure what your tool actually produces.
I think if you looked at posts that are jumping up in trending or hot from "real voters" versus bots might be useful. That way you can discount those using bots vs. real life votes. Is there anyway to do that? Thanks. Nice job by the way.
Thanks for the feedback! I actually think this is a great idea and something that the community needs. I would deliver a striking blow to the bot economy!
Wow! This seems to be a cool bot. And you are just 16! I will bookmark this and try it later. tip!
This is really cool man, I'm probably gonna keep using this - some work could be done on the layout of the message though, the periods made the hot/trending bit hard to read.
It's great to meet another student programmer on here :)
thanks, dude! I will try to make the layout better and I'm thinking of creating a website for the bot....
Wow! That's a really cool application. Not bad for a 16yo! I am impressed. Up voted and re-steemed!
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wow! I didn't thought I would ever make it...
Interesting project @wil1liam. Is it possible to work with it in the comment section? I mean, I think the transfers is not a good site to interact messages.
What do you think?
I think comments are not the ideal solution just like the transfers.... A website would be the most expensive one but on the other hand the best solution!
Exactly, a website would be useful.
For instance, I use github pages (see my post of custom feed), these pages are free.... but they are static pages. Then I use SteemJS, in this order, we don't need a server and all the magic happens in the browser of each one.
Okay, I think that would be a nice solution. However, the only problem is that I don't have any experience coding in javascript... Maybe we would collaborate. The main part of the bot is only 40 lines long in python!
this is a cool tool you have built :) inspiring
thanks
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
You can contact us on Discord.
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Good boy!
Thanks for sharing! Links to your post were included in the Steem.center wiki articles about Promoted, Trending and Hot Posts. Thanks and good luck again!