Witness Update 2018-04-30 - #TeamAustralia Sydney Meet-Up

I'm going to be quick today because I have been having a flu with headache since the weekend. The virus is giving me some down time so I'm taking the opportunity for this late Witness update.

What has changed since last update

Witness software update

I have updated my witness server to use the latest version of steemd, the witness software. It is now at version 0.19.3 and the major updates are security updates following an attack from a single spammer that brought chaos to the network.

It was a new kind of spam attack that took by surprise a lot of witnesses especially the top20 who were more exposed because they are scheduled to generate a block much more often.

Luckily for me, I was there at the right time and managed to handle the situation before my scheduled time and didn't miss any block.

I sent a Discord message to other witnesses I've help setup their server so they can also handle the attack and update their witness software with the latest changes.

If you are like me using Hive account@someguy123 Dockerized version of the witness software, please head to the following page and follow the instructions to update your software:
https://steemit.com/witness-update/@someguy123/important-update-steem-in-a-box-for-v0-19-3-steemfeed-js-update

#TeamAustralia Sydney Meet-Up

Hey Aussie Steemians! If you are around the Parramatta area on Saturday May 05th at around 2:30pm, why don't you join us at The Bavarian Bier Cafe.

Hive account@bearone has insisted that I come so I will be travelling all the way from The Central Coast! I will be talking about my experience as a Witness to the bunch of drunken boys and girls :-D

For more info, checkout this post:
https://steemit.com/meet-up/@bearone/teamaustralia-sydney-meet-up-in-5-days-it-s-not-too-late-to-register

Team Vietnam #vn

I have been following the Vietnamese community since almost the beginning and see what's going on. Recently, I've got more involved with them and got nicely surprised that their leaders, which includes Hive account@hanggggbeeee are giving a lot of effort to get the community to produce quality content and giving some personal time to fight against plagiarism from inside the community. They have been manually searching the #vn #vn-newbie and #vn-contest tags for posts that have been commented on by Hive account@cheetah or flagged by Hive account@steemcleaners and do their own investigation on whether or not the post is an false positive or real plagiarism. Users caught with plagiarism are warned once and on a second occurrence are removed from a curation / upvote list. They want to clean the vietnamese community reputation on the platform. Kudos!

In order to help them out, I created a Discord/Steem bot that listens to new comments from Cheetah and reports any posts from the Vietnamese tags. This is saving them a lot of manual tasks, but they still need to verify the similarities between the posts linked by Cheetah. And we realised that Cheetah has some difficulties and creating quite a few false positive on posts written in Vietnamese. Which is not surprising as even in English it's already a very challenging task.

Here is an example of a report made by the bot:

I can also manually trigger it with a command. The following command searches for the top 5 posts commented by a user in a particular tag and section, the example shows posts commented by Cheetah on /created/vn-newbie

I've been giving them instruction on how to find the #steemcleaners Discord channel to call for a review and for example, Hive account@octogang managed to get whitelisted because his amazing posts are all originals, he just uploads his content on multiple places.

I have been making writing contests with part of the prizes dedicated to the Vietnamese community, trying to motivate them to write original content, thinking of topics they can easily write about. For my last one I received the support from Hive account@steembasicincome who sponsored 10 SBI shares for the contest because they want to help the community grow on the platform. Hive account@carlpei, another member of the VN community even translated the Steem Basic Income complete review and has released part 1 (with the permission from Hive account@josephsavage).

Summary of some of my other contributions

Project	Description	Link
Steemed Phish	Chrome browser extension to make external links more visible and alert you on Phishing/Scamming links	Steemed Phish
Dtube Community Support	This project by Hive account@evildido allows users to run their own IPFS node and pin videos in order to cache them for longer. Dtube has the tendency of deleting non-popular video after few days only. I helped Dockerizing the project for an easier deployment on almost any platform. I've also contributed by running two nodes, one in Australia and one in Canada to cache #teamaustralia and #teamnz videos.	Dockerizing Dtube Community Support
DiscoSteem Bot	This is a Discord/Steem bot project by Hive account@planetenamek. When I started Steemulant Bot for the Vietnamese community, I didn't know the existence of DiscoSteem Bot and wanted something written in NodeJS. I've ended up continuing my own project as it contains code and logic for personal use and for the Vietnamese community. But I've decided to share some useful features that can benefit the users of DiscoSteem Bot and will continue to add more functionalities as I go.	Dockerizing DiscoSteem Bot

---

^{Vote for your 30 witnesses
Support me by voting for my witness via SteemConnect}

---

Credits

• The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.

Related content

• Witness update 2018-04-22 - Block Collision
• Witness update 2018-04-13 - Server upgrade
• Witness update 2018-03-30
• Witness report 2018-03-22 - Two weeks, two blocks
• Witness report 2018-03-16 - My first few days
• New Steem Witness announcement! Greetings from @quochuy
• My first votes for Witnesses

---

---

---

_{I don't follow for follow, I don't upvote for upvote. If you make quality posts that I like/enjoy then I will upvote and/or follow you}