STEEM Autovote Bot

Introduction

STEEM Autovote is a simple autovoting solution for STEEM users. Features include :

• Simple, customizable YAML configuration file.
• Allows users to monitor multiple accounts and autovote posts (not comments)
• Multiple accounts can autovote any monitored account
• Monitored accounts can be autovoted immediately or within a random time frame for each voting account
• Monitored accounts can be autovoted with a prescribed frequency for each voting account
• Upvotes only

Dependencies

STEEM Autovote has only two dependencies: PyYaml and Requests. On Ubuntu, these dependencies can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get install python-yaml python-requests

Depending on your system's python configuration, additional python packages may need to be installed. First, we will need to install python's pip.

sudo easy_install pip

Once pip is installed, we can install the other packages. This is accomplished with the following command:

sudo pip install python-dateutil

Configuration

Example configuration files are provided in the Examples directory as example1.yaml and example2.yaml. The configuration file is specified when calling the autovote-bot.py script:

python autovote-bot.py /home/username/autovote/autovote.yaml

Editting the yaml file may be difficult at first, but the rules are quite easy to remember.

• Do not allow for tabbed spaces, only single character white spaces and hard carriage returns.
• New accounts to monitor are added in the monitor section.
• Allow for two additional white spaces for each sub-list.
• The outermost list is the account to monitor.
• Voting ccounts of a monitored account are items in the sub-list of a monitored account.
• Two entries are required in the sub-list for each voting account: random_wait and frequency.

Example Configuration File

settings :
  wallet_password : walletpword
  rpc_ip : "127.0.0.1"
  rpc_port : 8091
  rpc_user : "rpcuser"
  rpc_password : "rpcpassword"
  log_file : "autoupvote.log"
  debug : true
  monitor :
    complexring :
      your_account_name :
        random_wait : 0 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 0 seconds
        frequency : 1 # probability that a vote will occur
      your_sock_puppet_account :
        random_wait : 100 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 100 seconds
        frequency : .1 # probability that a vote will occur
    your_account_name :
      your_account_name :
        random_wait : 0 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 0 seconds
        frequency : 1 # probability that a vote will occur
      your_sock_puppet_account :
        random_wait : 60 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 60 seconds
        frequency : .5 # probability that a vote will occur
    your_sock_puppet_account :
      your_account_name :
        random_wait : 1200 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 1200 seconds
        frequency : .333 # probability that a vote will occur
      your_sock_puppet_account :
        random_wait : 0 # random wait time, anytime from 0 to 0 seconds
        frequency : 1 # probability that a vote will occur

Random Settings

The block_id hash of the post of a monitored account is used as a seed in python's Mersennes Twister Pseudo Random Number Generator. This seed gets updated for each new post of any monitored account.

Running STEEM Autovote Bot

Running the autovote-bot script requires an open wallet, an instance of cli_wallet must be run as a daemon process, listening on an RPC port. On Ubuntu, this is best achieved using Upstart services.

Please see this guide for starting an upstart service for your cli_wallet.

Alternatively, you can run cli_wallet in an instance of a screen.

After installing screen type

screen

and then once you return to the shell, navigate to the cli_wallet directory and then type

./cli_wallet -u user -p password --rpc-endpoint=127.0.0.1:8091 -d 2>cli-debug.log 1>cli-error.log

Detach the screen with Ctrl + a and then Ctrl + x and you now have a cli_wallet daemon running.

There are at least 2 ways you can run the STEEM Autovote Bot.

• Use screen and navigate to the appropriate directory, and then run this process in the screened shell with python autovote-bot.py autovote.yaml
• Use an upstart service

Running as an Upstart Service

It is highly desirable to run the STEEM Autovote Bot as an upstart service so that on reboot and termination, a respawn of the process will occur.

Save the following script in /etc/init/steem-autovote-bot.conf (editted for your own system)

# steem-autovote-bot service - steem-autovote-bot service for user

description "STEEM Autovote bot"
author "Ima User <user@example.com>"

# Stanzas
#
# Stanzas control when and how a process is started and stopped
# See a list of stanzas here: //upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Stanzas

# When to start the service
start on runlevel [2345]

# When to stop the service
stop on runlevel [016]

# Automatically restart process if crashed
respawn

# Essentially lets upstart know the process will detach itself to the background
# This option does not seem to be of great importance, so it does not need to be set.
# expect fork

# Specify working directory
chdir /home/user/path/to/steem-autovote

# Specify the process/command to start, e.g.
exec /usr/bin/python autovote-bot.py autovote.yaml 2>autovote-debug.log 1>autovote-error.log

Upcoming Features

• Upvote with weights
• Downvote with weights
• Random Interval (not just from 0 to random_wait)
• Tracking of when (auto)votes occurred and adjusting times to vote to maximize voting power for both immediate votes and queued votes

Acknowledgments

I have heavily modified the STEEM witness steemed's source code for creating a STEEM Price Feed.