Hello Steem community,
Firstly, I would like to thank @elyaque for telling me about a slight bug in SteemWhales that turned everyone to red (inactive). See for yourself:
I did a quick investigation of the problem, and quickly realized this had nothing to do with my coding, it was just that Hard Fork 18 broke it. Ok, 'it can happen' was my first thought. Unfortunatly, I wasn't able to 100% fix this, and let me explain why.
SteemWhales relied on the 'Last Bandwidth Update' field of the accounts, which DOES NOT get updated anymore since HF18. Instead, SteemWhales will now rely on the 'Last Vote' and 'Last Post' times, and use the most recent. Which means accounts that don't vote or post on the blockchain, will be marked as inactive even if they do monetary transfers. Sucks but there is no way around it, because of the lack of professionalism of the STEEM blockchain team, whoever they are.
After more investigation, I realised the 'average bandwidth' field doesn't get updated either, and seems to have been replaced by a field called 'New Bandwidth Average'. Clearly, cloning a field, without removing the old one, and calling the new one the same and prepending 'new' in front is a terrible coding practise... Any API call will still fetch the old, completly useless field, wasting everyone's internet bandwidth and turning our planet even faster from habitable, to a dead rock.
But more importantly... Why the fuck can't we get a 'New Last Bandwidth Update' time also? This way I would have been able to keep the feature on my website intact.
Oh yeah also I discovered that voting or unvoting a content older than 30 days, will not update the 'Last Vote' time either. Bug or feature? You tell me.
And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg, what I personally looked into. I really doubt it's an isolated problem.
I've seen the 240p video made by the new marketing guy where he talks about the ecosystem and how we want to have a bunch of apps using the STEEM blockchain. I 100% agree but then PLEASE:
- DONT REMOVE EXISTING FEATURES IF IT IS NOT REQUIRED, CHANCES ARE SOME APPS USE THIS FEATURE
- IF YOU STILL DO, AT THE FUCKING LEAST MAKE A DOCUMENT ABOUT THE CHANGES THAT DEVS CAN FIND QUICKLY
- STOP WASTING DATA. IF SOMETHING IS USELESS, REMOVE IT. WE WANT TO SCALE AND GO LONG TERM
I hope some good people who are interested in building something on top of STEEM read this post and get discouraged by it. This is actually my prime intention for this rant. Maintaining an app on top of something managed by retards will end up in your app breaking more often than your users can accept, completly ruining your project and all your efforts.
The anonymous time-wasting faggots running this boat have sold millions of USD worth through poloniex and other exchanges in the past 8 months. We already know that STEEM, unlike SteemWhales, is not a benevolent project (see https://github.com/steemit/steem/pull/936). If they consider themselves a business, not a hustle, it's about time they invest in proper staff, communication and equipment.
My $0.02,
heimindanger
www.steemwhales.com