Today’s @steemitblog post is brought to you by Steemit’s Applications Team. In this post we will highlight some recent changes we have made to two of our front-end applications: condenser (steemit.com) and the faucet (sign-up system). We will also talk briefly about some of the other changes we have been working on.
The Applications Team
The Applications Team is currently focusing on three areas:
- Front-end products, such as the faucet and condenser
- Backend services, such as Hivemind (Communities) and SBDS
- Development and Operations (DevOps) / systems engineers
Paid Sign-Up Options
We’re doing a lot to improve the sign-up process and mitigate bots on the platform. In addition to that work we now present users with alternative third-party paid sign-up options when they go to create an account. This allows users who aren’t comfortable providing their personal information an easy way to create an account, and provides users who want to get started right away an option to skip the line.
We know it’s wordy, but we wanted to be very clear about why the two options exist and the fact that we are not profiting from the paid sign-up options.
Transfer Confirmation Step
Because token transfers are irreversible, we wanted to help users avoid making erroneous transfers. We've now added a step which displays all the details of the transfer before the user signs the transaction. This additional step should help prevent people from making payment errors. We plan to make the user interface more appealing in the future, but for now it does the job.
Upload Image Buttons
Thanks to a community contribution from GitHub user @voorash, you can now finally change your cover photo or profile images by uploading an image file directly from your hard drive! Simply click “Upload an image” in your Settings page:
Payout Options in Settings
We moved the dropdown for selecting payout options (Decline Payout, 50% SBD / 50% SP, and Power Up 100%) away from the posting interface and into the settings page. This was an “advanced user” option that only created confusion for the majority of users. We also added the ability to select a payout option for comments.
Any users interested in toggling their payout options simply need to select the new setting from their Preferences, and it will immediately take effect for new posts/comments going forward.
New Bandwidth Option
Whenever anyone transacts on the Steem blockchain (posting content, commenting, upvoting, etc.), computational resources are used. “Bandwidth” is the resource that regulates this usage to ensure that we are not making unsustainable demands of the network. During times of heavy usage, or if the user performs too many actions, they can use up all their bandwidth allocation and become unable to transact until their bandwidth recharges. We wanted to give these users an “actionable” that would explain why they are running into the error and help them resolve the issue in order to continue interacting through steemit.com.
Now, when a user is unable to perform a transaction due to a lack of bandwidth, a modal will appear that clearly explains the issue and displays a “Buy Steem Power” option. The Buy Steem Power link takes them to BlockTrades, the only interface through which users can purchase Steem Power directly. This is necessary because a user cannot power up purchased STEEM if they have run out of bandwidth. We are currently researching more ways to improve the user experience relating to bandwidth.
Miscellaneous
Other changes we have been working on include boring (but important) bug fixes, and highly technical changes. Users interested in learning more about these can track our development in the steemit GitHub repositories.
We’ve spent a lot of time strategizing about how to combat bots+spam on the platform, how to continue improving the sign-up process, how to better protect the ecosystem against attacks, and how to improve overall performance. We expect to make a lot of progress on those fronts and look forward to telling you more about our work moving forward.
Thanks for reading.
Steemit Applications Team
Direct buy is fantastic news! Great update
I agree 100% and give you a 100% Upvote in leu of the upvote of this post since its decline payout :D and your comment was like 60 cents so my now 40 cent upvote was perfect for pushing your comment over $1 :D
Oh and LOOk what I made! A THIRD option for the Free Signup and Instant Signup Paid option, I made a THIRD possible Free Instant option with APPLICATION, if you already have an existing social media with good content, followers or a demo reel or a resume,
In my possible third option, I personally do what I already do, which is use around 500 SP to create a few new signups a day, and if a few others joined in a few hundred SP, you could probobly take care of all the 0.1 steem and 14.5 SWP delegation for 1 week needed to help instantly create an sccount using https://steeminvite.com by @pharesim so I volunteer my SP, I have been creating accounts for people and I had to start making people apply to get them for free because too many users just createdn an accouynt posted once or never and it was a waste... So if you just make people apply and ask for a simple proof of value, either proof of existing social media account with valuable content followers, or a demo reel if your an artist or a resume or just an essay or even a video youtube link of you explaining why you feel you deserve an instant steem accoiunt at a time when the blockchain cannot handle giving everyone free acounts, when they are limited, basically what you can offer to make paying the 30 cents plus 14.5 Styeempower delegated for one week which is around $50 worth fo steem, so although that is just for one week, it still costs money to rent that amount of steempoiwer even for a week, and even if its just a few dollars worth , it still costs money, and we do have a paid option, BUT if you are willing to come on board and really work to promote steem I'm willing to use my own steempower to create yoru account and I have been doing this and I only stopped getting requests because I havent put out any fresh offers to do it but I still will help people from time to time with steeminvite I just havent been adevrtising it as a service on instagram and steem posts but I swear there is a demand, and I feel a group for helping people get instant accounts already exist, many of them do, we could poolthat p[ower intoone fuynnel right here at the signup page, I propose we do this to help curate the shiny gems of humanity that we may miss if they don't have money or just don't have any crypto, I believe you can only pay with crypto and many people don't have a way to buy bitcoin very easily so we may miss some nice users who may have money but can't get the btc to pay the steemit account creation fee on blocktrades. Anyway I think an application system, just until HF20, would be nice but don't get me wrong, I am very very happy with current changes
the new system is amazing and I am very very grateful thank you so much steemit application team!
Thanks for the upvote :D
An actual good idea for sure! I'm definitely in favor of helping get bigger actors on the platform as well, if tons of big social personas got on STEEM it could easily explode the price.
What is the instant account creation fee?
No it ain't free. What would be the difference between the two sign ups?
I think that this is a great idea, this way the giants will get into action who doesn't like to wait for ages to sign up.
Something that explains on the list how fast the processes is for each site would be a good idea. This way people can be clear what their option are if they want it now or possibly weeks.
Thank you for your contributions and updates Steemit Applications Team. It would be nice if you could take a precaution to not send users' passwords as posts or comments or memo. Some malicious people follow these posts and comments and hack their accounts. Lately, many of our friends have lost their accounts because of this issue.
Unfortunately, such a thing happened to my friend. This is a very bad situation. I hope nobody lives in this situation again. He even wrote post about himself.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@canburaksimsek/steemit-hesabim-calindi-simdi-ne-yapmaliyim-steemit-my-account-is-stolen-what-am-i-to-do-now
Sorry about your friend's loss,it also happened to my close friend,within seconds his account was emptied(i have read that post and damn...that was so much Steem.)
The suggestion he had is the one i also had in mind,disable any content in comments that starts with "P5...." probably bring a mesaage before a person presses the post button.
There is already a warning when posting with strings that look like WIFs (formatted private keys). I was giving away credentials for a testnet account. Such a change would possibly only require modifying a single string.
I believe the wallet page already prevents that. The main issue is when users put their keys in to external (non trusted) websites.
hey @timcliff. I have a question: do you use this board or is it outdated?
And as a second question, if you have some extra time, how can people run jenkins on steem?
Thanks a lot!
Afaik, that board is still accurate for HF 20.
I do not know how to run jenkins. It is part of the check-in process in GitHub. It is not required to run a steemd node though.
As far as I know, this feature is only on the wallet page, not posts or comments. Yes, as you say, it's very important to keep the keys safe.
Good suggestion. Do you know how to open a community enhancement suggestion in GitHub?
Yes, I know if you can send the required project link I would be very pleased.
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues
Thanks a lot. I write an issue https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/2786
Ahh thats good to know that the official steemit page already prevents the sending of what it sees as a key in the memo field, that's nice. Well I guess one day we may have some hypothetical 2factor authentication system for steem, or we may have some sort of culture of just never leaving much liquid SBD or Steem in your wallet, so only SP is there, and maybe have a faster account recovery system since Ive had a friend steem4depoor now steemgh loose 180 SP after his 30 days went by after no response from steemit , but yeah stolen accounts and all the phishers is a problem but I feel one dya steemit inc will just start blocking KNOWN phishers and scammers, like people withouta doubt have been phishing, just block them from the front end, block their messages from even being displayed, I feel like that si an easy simpel answer, and I bet it 3wil eventually happen one day :D That way theer will be no more links for users to get phished from OR BETTER yet make it so at least the official steemit front end doenst even allow a known phishing lnk to be posted in their text box maybe?
2factor would work if the transfers occurred through steemit.com. Steemit could add 2f, but since an attacker can always just go directly to the blockchain API and submit the transfers there - there is no way to really enforce it.
No. The blockchain can do 2nd factor. I am developing a wallet for that. You need one or a number of third parties for cosigning that do one time passcodes and special software that can send these partially signed transactions to said parties. The wallet needs to be manipulated by the owner key to weaken the authority 9/10 power and then give 1/10 power to the others. Once set up, The third parties cannot misuse the power because they do not have enough authority. A hacker with your active key cannot misuse without the 2fa.
Interesting. That seems like it would be really beneficial. Good luck with the project!
No. The blockchain can do 2nd factor. I am developing a wallet for that. You need one or a number of third parties for cosigning that do one time passcodes and special software that can send these partially signed transactions to said parties. The account needs to be manipulated by the owner key to weaken the authority 9/10 power and then give 1/10 power to the others. Once set up, The third parties cannot misuse the power because they do not have enough authority. A hacker with your active key cannot misuse without the 2fa.
This is all great news! But let's be honest, we were all kind of hoping some little nugget about SMT's would be dropped.
As far as I understood they're devided in three teams who update us on their specific doings (see list on beginnings of the article). SMTs would belong to the dev team I guess. The changes communicated here were improvements on the front-end side.
Mm. I knew this. Still, I was hoping that some tidbit pertaining to them would get dropped.
that's what i'm talkin' about! what's up with #SMT's!
Thanks for the update! These changes really improve the handling of the interface.
It'd be fantastic to read more about this one here soon:
The save function does not work on https://v2.steemconnect.com/apps/@steemhost.app/edit
Where does one get tech support?
The signup delay has been a big issue. I have many friends who wanted to join Steemit but when they heard that they had to wait for days to weeks before they could have a new account, they became discouraged.
With the new "paid signup" option, everyone will have an opportunity to skip the queue and start earning STEEM right away.
This is good news for all potential Steemians.
I also appreciate the fix on funds transfer, now I can double check where my funds is going to before I tap the send button.
My heart is red for the payment settings introduced in the comment section. I have always dreamt about this. Congratulations to us all.
Theses developments are good for the user experience but i think most users are waiting for more information on SMT's. we really shouldnt be worried about more signups until we can work on Retention of the current users. what is the point of gtting 500 signups a day if 80-90% of those users are deterred by false hopes and a realtivley corrupt system?
Your post is very helpfull. Some cent's for you.
Nice job. Regarding the paid signup, does that mean users can create multiple accounts without the need for phone numbers?
Thanks
Not exactly sure how instant account creation will help in fighting bots. Manual review of user account creation at least somehow helped.
For example, when creating an account for my wife, it never went through successfully / most likely due to a fact both mine and her are created from the same static IP. I found that a good thing.
Account has been created at the end using my cli_wallet
With new option, in my personal opinion, we can only expect raise in Bot / spamming accounts as right now everyone can pay and get onboard instantly.
In ideal world, all new accounts should be reviewed. It's not a convenient solution, but what's even less convenient is current "rich got richer" by utilising tons of ghost accounts. It may directly lead to creation of Ponzi, even when Steemit is not that by a design.
Strongly support any updates and hard work done, but it would be useful to more directly address the strategy of fighting spam / bots. - the main obstacle of further steemit raise / and primarly source of frustration for our precious minnows.
On another side, if we can reach more people to join, that would be a huge benefit.
The options were always there before, Steemit just didn't show them on the register page.They aren't new and were always easy to find. I've created several accounts in the past using SteemConnect. The old/normal way for newcomers to signup has them give a phone number to prove their identity before Steemit pays the registration fee for them to sign up. It works the same way that other options work except you don't pay and the Steemit team has to manually verify accounts.
Ok, that would make sense. Still, I would be very interested to read more in-depth about the strategy of fighting bots and spam. Apart from bringing up wider audience, spam is currently most burning topic - and, in my opinion the biggest threat for health of the ecosystem.
Thank you for your work. You are great magic people.
Can I take small advice. Could we combine "Promotion Page" and "Tranding Page". Maybe it can decrease influence of BidBots. And process of burning of Steem/SBD will have good influence on course.
Thank you 😀😀😀😀
The current version of the trending page will be going away once communities are released, so it will probably be best to save a change like that until then.
This is good. I hope "communities" will change situation to best way.
Thank you for your answer ☺☺☺☺
@steemitblog, Pop up descriptions for each of the dapps/platforms on the right hand side of the signup page which are using STEEM would be ideal. Any new person signing up won't have a clue what those icons represent. Even a mere link to their respective pages would be useful. Or even a name for what those icons/logos represent would be helpful...
Qué buena información
The transaction confirmation Window is a helpful and welcome add-on. Small things like these makes a lot of difference.
The account creation updates are a good start, but it’s still not user friendly. Honestly, nothing here is user friendly, of which I just can’t understand why... These simple user specific processes and front end design stuff, should be an easy to achieve outcome right now. This quote from the post really concerned me:
Just does the job? Come on guys, this is customer facing, front end stuff that needs to be done right. Not just do a job.
Anyway, good to see this account starting to get more active in letting the steemit community know what’s actually happening behind the scenes. With the activity increase in the @steemitblog account and @ned’s PR drive, we’re getting excited about something big possibly being launched soon... SMTs, yeah?
😉✌🏻.
I think this is good progress.
However, I'm not sure all prospective users will see it this way, as they don't necessarily understand why they are paying third parties to create what they think they should be getting for free. As one person on Reddit said to me when I described the 3rd-party options to them: "If you need a "paid account creation service" to get approved, then it's just a scam".
OK, so it's not a scam (that I'm aware of), but for people accustomed to getting what they want online instantly, this might not sit well.
Thanks for the shout out for my contribution. Thanks should also go to witness @FollowBTCNews for throwing some steem my way allowing me to take time from other work to work on this.
Good to know, thanks. And thanks again for contributing!
Its almost giving steemit an "exclusive" feel, will definitely help with the uptake. AMAZING JOB
Thanks for the Update!
We already covered most of the changes for the german speaking Community here:
and here:
We also wonder, if you bring back article-views as this number also disappeared but was a very useful number to check if your articles were viewed by your followers?
Br
@nissla from @QuickTipps
no, since I know these are not coming back, they were considered inaccurate, that is why the view count was removed
I did not that we can select a payout option for our comments,
Thank you
where is the #SMT update?
Wow, this is so great, after all it seems that somebody heard a small voice in this cowd, congrats Steemit Team for this one:
I guess this improves a lot the ecosystem on the long run so keep up the good work!
Very good work
It develops from our work a lot
Thank you for the great information
Question: If I pay to create an account for someone, can they still set their recovery account to "steem" and use account recovery services from Steemit, Inc if/when necessary?
No
Well timed
This has been a big issue for quite some time now
Cool modifications
Fantastic! I'm waiting for more good stuff! I like how platform is flexible and adjustment for users. Great work! :D
There are typos on the new signup page. Can they be fixed?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@preparedwombat/typos-in-steemit-s-signup-page
Can you please open a GitHub issue for that?
https://github.com/steemit/faucet/issues
By you do you mean me or @steemitblog? Not being a developer, GitHub is terra incognita.
You :)
We are all "beta testers". It is good to learn how to open up issues.
It is pretty similar to creating a post on steemit.com.
It’s now issue #346.
Awesome :)
I am new this environment and this blog gave me some idea why I had to wait for some time get my account. I hope the work by the team would make the system more stable and bot-free. Kudos to Steemit Application Team. Keep up the good work
Another suggestion for the bandwidth problem would be to point the user to some page (steemd?) Where the user could check his current bandwidth...
Good news all around.
Steemit Apps Team, thank-you for this update.
To date the issue of solving the sign-up problem for our app keeps us up at night. We were hoping HF20 would solve these problems, but until it's released user signups remain our primary concern.
We are already aware of the ability to create new accounts manually for our community and would be willing to do so given enough resources. As yet we have been unable to find the delegations we need to start generating enough SP to fund ongoing manual account sign-up.
And given the bulk of our users will come from existing communities withing our market segment, it is unlikely they will have the crypto currency on hand to create their own accounts.
Our vision is to bring Steem to the masses, who have largely ignored or rebuffed the crypto space so far. Proving to them that an application worthy of their attention can also be a soft entry point into the crypto world as we know it.
More importantly, we chose Steem to be that first entry point, and as people always remember their 'first' experience we believe this could have considerable upside in distribution of the Steem token.
Yes, we believe in the Steem blockchain and can see incredible potential, but until the account sign-up process is streamlined it remains a blocking point for our application.
I guess the question that comes to mind is why is everything seemingly wrapped into one Hard Fork. Was there not an opportunity to separate some features into an earlier HF?
Regardless keep pushing forward and we will continue to follow.
The signup delay has been a big problem and Thank you so much for solving this issue :)
I see a lot of good changes ;)
This is great to see this.. helpful post . congratulation steemit team.
Thanks for sharing a good information for us..
Excellent post thanks for sharing.
gratitude for making positive changes so the community can thrive !
Please, make the sbds work :)
Hope all the great news keep coming more and more
Amazing news, and its really nice to see this kind of contributions
Nice changes. Communications like that are what we need on a regular basis :)
Happy about all the new features, keep up the good work!
If anyone really reads this, ill like to see a few new major things.
Can't you people do something about payout?What we earn we loss most of it when it pays out.It should be taken care.Then steemit will be more enjoyable.Lots of people get's frustrated for this pay out system.Think about it.
This is an awesome update especially the paid sign up option. Nice minor updates on the profile settings also! Keep it up guys.
One of the best updates ever.the direct fast sign up is a treat.
Upload image buttons is a good facility too which leaves you to update your pictures directly without copying the link.
Thank you for these updates steemit. Love steem community service
Ohhhh... condenser! I just freakin realized why that is a clever name...
Fantastic post friend
whether the process is fast