(This is a pre-proposal post that will be presented as part of the proposal for voting if there is any community support and viability)
Spaminator is an anti-abuse and anti-exploitation project designed to restore funds back to the reward pool.
Financial Ask
$50/year x 2 domain names (Hivewatchers and Spaminator, keeping them together for the sake of simplicity)
$10/month for hosting the API/list backend
$15/month for hosting the server that runs the actual bot
$100/month for maintenance of bot/tech
Total: $1550 / year
Notes
This is a no-usage labor costs proposal. The maintenance costs above are purely for a developer who is not myself to monitor and update the framework (backend bot, its database, etc). No frontend hours are included because frontend updates are non-critical.
The $100 monthly amount is calculated on average based on annual hours. It is conservative.
My own labor costs or the labor costs of Logic, etc of entering data, researching etc are not included. We will manage those in different proposals or mechanisms. This is purely to pay for the tech and its upkeep. It does not include any maintenance of the Hivewatchers site.
About Spaminator
Spaminator aims to deter large-scale reward and account exploitation attempts by systemically removing rewards from comments and posts. It focuses on the act of farming or spam for the detrimental purposes of extraction and differentiates between that and service bots or interactions with a meaning. It's scope is fluid and gets revisited on a semi-annual basis, keeping it relevant to currently-applicable scenarios. Currently, Spaminator runs with its own @spaminator account to mark posts and with @theycallmedan's account to return rewards to the community pool.
Important
No attempts to harass, pressure or otherwise manipulate the operation of the Spaminator bot will be successful as a result of any attempts in this proposal's comments or elsewhere related. Aiming to leverage the proposal to manipulate will not result in anything but a waste of time. Please present only comments to do with the proposal itself.
Update 16 May: Forgot that the proposal system requires a rounded daily amount. That brings us to 1825 HBD a year. When HBD equal to $1, we may end up with a surplus, the maximum being $275. We'll roll that into another anti-abuse tech-only server and I'll put up a post on that later after getting the specs.
I will vote for this proposal.
Where did you buy your domains, .com domains are $13 on namecheap.
Maintaining bots is not that hard, $100 is monthly wage in some countries for full time work.
I don't use namecheap although I heard about it.
$100 here will barely fill your truck with gas. In some countries it can indeed go a long way but not in US/CA.
What is being asked in this proposal is, in my opinion, very conservative.
Do you have an idea how much it costs to maintain a server?
The electricity alone is usually between 20 and 50 US dollars a month depending on in which state your server is located. Add licenses, parts that need to be replaced and so on and you quickly get to $ 100 a month.
Regarding dev maintenance that's a very low request as well. You periodically need to install security patches, sw updates, fix bugs, update your bot due to API deprecation (eg. new hard fork), test your fixes, perform monitoring and support, etc etc.
Also keep in mind that the average salary in the US is 80 K a year. In some cities like New York, Miami or California they're even higher. Quality isn't cheap. People that work on these projects most of the times are freelancers/contractors. I have been doing that for 5 years now and I can assure you that for instance in the UK they don't charge less than £ 300 a day and in the US no less than $ 1K a day. So what this proposal is asking is almost pocket money, in proportion.
I am pretty sure that the main purpose of this proposal is not speculation but just to get a little something back while supporting the community and the ideals behind its blockchain.
Also, from what this proposal is asking in terms of fundings you also need to consider taxes, hbd price fluctuations and risk of funding halt!
Yes, I have maintained many servers.
Hive bot don't need more than 16 GB RAM, you can get 64 GB RAM servers for less than $50 per month (Hetzner).
Outsource the work to Asia of Eastern Europe. It's not like linux server admins and (probably) JS devs are hard to find. All the work can be done remote.
Will vote for this proposal, for the following reasons:
You fix mistakes that are made and you give people a chance, not only with people "helping to explain things" but also with the people involved actually going out and doing homework and gathering all the relevant information.
Without any "emotions".
You know my personal dislike of how the 'downvoting' has been used/abused by many people who wish to use that for 'personal expression' and not as a tool for the good of the ecosystem/economy.
But the teams of people and in many cases individuals doing all the hard work on their own, imo $1,600 a year is not much, considering all the hours of work and effort put in.
Can't compare it to any commercial service out there.
Who out there is willing to work for free and get blasted for doing the right thing (trying to do the right thing) and having better results than any of the so called self proclaimed "policing forces" out there.
So covering costs involved in maintaining this valuable service to the ecosystem is the bare minimum as the labour hours are not accounted for, when it comes to the hard work involved.
Much more service provided than what stinc ever provided as far as the community and ecosystem go.
&
adding to all this, is the fact that the team there never judged new platforms, only those who literally were out to 'spam' the chain in various ways with all sorts of creative means.
So yeah, that pretty much covers why I am voting for this proposal, even if my vote won't make much of a difference in the grand picture.
Cheers.
Thank you for the feedback. Much appreciated. I know it's a tough sell to you so if you see the value then we must be doing something right.
hello dear @spaminator why u flagged my all posts :)
Please go over to the Discord to discuss this https://discord.gg/JnvkJMV
thanks i writed here , they stoppped spaminator but banned me from discord channel :D
Check your wallet for any money you haven't sent. Were you aware that your account was compromised?
hey whats the mean i cant understand sorry can u explain a bit, my english is in middle level
You were on Spaminator's list of hacked accounts. Double check your account for any strange transactions.
yes i was hacked and i change password , he ( the b.tch ) withdraw all funds and not steal my account :/ also im member (+3 years) in Turkish community and they knows me ,, i will be more careful , but why i banned from @spaminator discord server without any talk i do not understand
Hlw @guiltyparties Why can't I join your discord channel?
Is a joke your Discord group 🤡🤡🤡
@spaminator please remove me from your blacklist, I will not repeat my mistakes again,
I want you to stop downvoting nice little old ladies for sharing bible verses. What do you think of that?
Thanks for the respons. Great succes to you all. Thanks
bello.
Voted. Btw, where I can report a spammer?
hi! Sorry for messaging you like this but would really like to talk to you @spaminator! First, thanks for doing a great job in order to restore funds back to the reward pool. Recently, you put on your lists my account @marina and account @commun. Neither of us aims at getting funds from hive. I am looking for the creators who are doing great things in order to suggest them to get donations on commun.com, and @commun messaged the newcomers to invite them to check one more dApp. Please, check the messages manually. If your forbid to invite nice people to any other decentralised services here then correct, please, the aim of your work. I would appreciate it tremendously if you whitelist both accounts and let me know which actions in terms of invites you approve and which not. I promise to follow the rules. Thanks in advance!
@spaminature I want to know why u downvote my all post . If my mistake u tell me I work on it.but plzzz now do not again .
Hello,
We were wondering why you are down voting our community post. We post once per day. We don't comment spam. We support a small community of posters. We have never powered down. In the past, we used the proceeds of the posts to rent SP to use it to vote on community members' posts. We are currently not renting HP because there is no efficient and easy way to do it. We are hopeful an efficient and easy way will emerge. We used to be @steemiteducation and have encouraged thousands of posts over the past 3+ years.
Oh wow...
If only you are this proactive about your initiative than about downvotes, maybe you could have gotten somewhere?
Copy/pasting the same post for well over a month would get you downvotes.
We have been proactively trying to encourage content creators for over 3 years. We have put in well over 1500 hours during that time. We understand your point of view about the negative aspect of a post like this. But please don't insinuate that we have not put in a tremendous amount of effort trying to help the platforms and content creators. From our point of view, we saw one small post being used as a seed to help many, many others as a worth while trade off. We are just people volunteering our time and thought it would be better spent looking for posts than on posting a new post every day. If you disagree, we respect that. This could have been handled with communication. There was no need for downvotes and blacklists.
That's the lie you tell yourselves.
If you are half serious about your project, you wouldn't settle for copy/paste. The rest are excuses.
If you thought your time was better spent "looking for posts", then you wouldn't repeatedly post and repost the same thing over and over for months.
You have no argument. It's all justifications.
Anyone in the community would agree.
It's common sense what you are doing is dumb. You are not new to the ecosystem. There is no excuse.
We know we are not succeeding... but it is not from lack of effort, indecency, stupidity, selfishness, or evil. Although our community is small, we do have 1253 subscribers (I'm sure that is inflated though) and $664 in pending rewards. The daily post is a tiny portion of what we do. We aren't powering down or selling. We are putting 100% of the proceeds back into the community.
I get that you are used to dealing with scammers, but in this case, you are dealing with some volunteers who are doing their best to help. And we are also very reasonable and willing to listen to your point of view. This doesn't need to be contentious. It is as simple as "I hear your point of view education-hive, but in the current situation, your method is having a negative impact on the platform." and then we say "We had not been thinking of it like that. We are going to try to find a way that has a more positive impact. Thanks for looking out for the platform."
I would only be that nice if you guys were new on the platform.
As for the blacklist, you'd have to figure that out with @hivewatchers.
Could you tell me reason Why my post has been unvoted? I really want to know what went wrong ?
Watin I do yo na!!??
Talk am make I know!
You just Dey vote me down
Come tag me spaminator
Brother man how for Dey if I pull up in the Range Rover because of this app!!!
You just Dey bad mind me!!
Reason me whats up ni come Dey the cast me or even come brand me on top!
Spaminator What the hell is your problem with me? Every time I post anything you downvote it without watching the video or even looking at the context this is getting annoying and proves how this project is abusive to everyone.
Munyuk
Please, what do I need to do to stop getting downvoted by you?
Hey @spaminator stop flag my account and account of my friend ! Stop flag random people ! No sense your flag ! You work for justin Sun ?
Hello @spaminator Why did you blacklist me.I don't understand what my crime is?
I won't support your proposal because you have put me on a blacklist and are downvoting my original posts and it makes me wonder how many other legitimate people are you doing this to the blacklists are ok if used properly and not ( abused ) and that's exactly what you are doing with spaminator
You were put on the blacklist because of your multiple accounts that were set up to exploit. When you do that, you create links on the blockchain and its easy for anyone to find them. Also, we still don't process appeals on Instagram. Refer to the Discord to appeal. https://discord.gg/JnvkJMV
Thanks for replying appreciate that. I've tried to join the server and ( the invite is invalid or expired ) I've definitely not set multi accounts to exploit I've actually invested my own money. I've admitted over and over again I made a honest mistake with my other account and it would not happen again but I still don't get why you have blacklisted this account when I've done nothing wrong all I ask is that you do the right thing I'm waiting for your reply 🤝
It may be because you have 100 servers joined.
I've only joined 3 servers just send a link that works I've got witnesses to prove it doesn't work just take me off the blacklist I'm waiting for your reply
I just clicked the link supplied above and I was able to join.
I was blocked
That's the thing I'm not trying to get into a fight with them I just don't want to be on this blacklist it's not a good look for me or hive because I have a lot of people looking in wondering why I'm on this blacklist.
Thanks for sharing that list
Halo #spaminator Saya ingin mengirim permintaan untuk tidak Downvote saya lagi, karena kesalahan saya tidak berulang kali membuat postingan yang tidak berkualitas lagi dan saya akan lebih profesional. Saya harap saya akan bebas seperti sebelumnya setelah saya minta maaf.
Hello #spaminator I want to send a request not to downvote me anymore, because my mistake does not repeatedly make posts that are no longer qualified and I will be more professional. I hope I will be free as before after I apologize.
Why would any sane person support this while you are mass down voting legit posts and comments?!
You know you can essentially do that by voting on the return proposal?
Waiting for your millions of HP powered up ;-)
What are you talking about? You message me all the time. Additionally, Dtube isn't on the blacklist.