Important changes to Minnow Support upvote bot behavior
We need to talk about the current state of this account and how it is used for the free upvote bot on Discord.
Put simply, it's getting drained.
Recently, we completely redesigned and upgraded our upvote bot on Discord. This change has actually allowed for a greater use of the bot, as we no longer penalize with a cool-down on any incorrect use of the command. Each user is only given a cool-down once they successfully use the command. This cool-down is currently 12 hours.
While the bot had been down for this redesign/upgrade for more than a week, it had a chance to recharge to 100% several times. Some manual curation was done to prevent wasting the VP of the bot during that period.
This situation as of now:
- Upon opening for voting with the new bot, the account was at approx. 72% VP.
- In the last 63 hours since then, approximately 4,970 votes at 1% have been made.
- This has left us at (at the time of writing this post) 39.13% VP (worth only about $0.15 at current SP)
This will eventually drain the account to to an even more unacceptable level if we do nothing. As it stands, we already consider this VP% to be lower than is optimal.
Without a significant SP delegation increase, this will continue to be a problem at the current settings.
To this end, we are going to be changing the cool-down period on each user for the use of the command.
At release of this post, 
will move to a 24 hour cool-down period on the bot command in Discord.
At this time we are going to leave the voting weight of each use of the command at 1% and monitor the situation. There is going to be internal discussion of other possible methods to help the bot recover, like taking one day each week to stop upvoting and allow the bot to recover some. Any such changes will be announced.
Some other changes that are currently pending.
We have always been somewhat active in reviewing content that gets upvoted and filtering or even Blacklisting as needed.
Post with examples on some of our guidelines for content quality.
While in the past we did this manually, we are going to be adding some filters that are active at time of use of the bot. This will serve to help users not waste a cool-down on an upvote we will just pull after the fact, and helps to inspire them to use their 1 upvote every 24 hours on their best possible posts. It will also free up staff here to spend more time reviewing and preventing actual abuse of the bot, as well as coaching for those that might just need to up their quality levels.
For the purposes of transparency, we are going to be clear about these filters here. These are not going to be enabled immediately, but starting in the coming week. (Dependent on implementation). None of these are because we don't believe in the platforms involved, simply that they are inherently going to have posts that are outside our quality guidelines.
The following post criteria will not be allowed to succeed at the time of command use:
- dMania: Currently the dMania platform only allows for a single image/video to be part of the post. We already filter these posts manually, but as no post created with dMania can meet our guidelines without being edited (and thereby removing them from consideration for dMania upvote), any post by dMania will always be under our requirements.
- dLive: In the same vein as this, but even more clear cut. These posts are always a link to the currently available live-stream and do not even continue to be valuable content after the stream has ended.
- Steepshot: Like dMania, these posts are intended to be a single image generally. This places them outside our standards for use on upvote. We find it will be easier to ask our members to instead create another post that does fit our guidelines and use their cool-down on that, rather than expect each Steepshot post to be manually allowed/restricted by our team.
At this time, those are the only criteria which have been voted on internally by our team. These do not represent the total changes we may make, and are subject to change/addition at any time in the future. (We will of course endeavor to announce any changes to the filter for transparency.)
We continue our mission to help as many new Steemit users as we can. Regardless of this being from our efforts at coaching on content creation, answering questions about Steemit and the blockchain in Discord, or even just providing our free upvote bot. We want to see every minnow succeed and we believe the above changes will best help us do that.
If you have any questions, please join us in Discord and ask an available Moderator or member of leadership.