Hello Hive account@curie collective, yesterday while monitoring my own witness server, I noticed something odd about the logs going by. Here is what I saw:

Got 36 transactions on block 21192256 by curie -- latency: 390 ms 856091ms th_a       database.cpp:538              _maybe_warn_multiple ] 
Encountered block num collision at block 21192256 due to a fork, witnesses are: [["curie","2018-04-01T18:14:15"],["curie","2018-04-01T18:14:15"]]

I went to the witness chat and pasted the log at 2:16 PM and asked other witnesses if this was normal.

Hive account@jamzed was the first to recognised that the curie witness was running two nodes with the same signing key.

By 2:46 PM, I asked the chat if the witness curie was reachable?

Hive account@drakos and the others present did not know who was running it.

A little more digging on steemd.com and I found that curie's recovery account is anonsteem and he only votes for himself as a witness. 🤔

At 3 PM I had found Curie's Discord server: https://discord.gg/shKPbR8 and asked who to contact in their witness channel because of the collisions.

By 4:14 PM the very helpful Hive account@geekgirl said: Caboosethevehicledestroyer is the witness operator. He will respond when gets a chance.

Hive account@ats.david from steemit.chat 5:16 PM suggested I try reaching liberosist or alcibiades.

It is at 5:44 PM that I relayed the message from Hive account@geekgirl to the witness chat, while still waiting to be contacted. (still waiting...)

And by 6:05 PM two other top 20 witness Hive account@timcliff and Hive account@xeldal unapprove witness curie and by so doing took it out of the top 20.

In the end Hive account@locikll came to the witness chat at 11:53 PM (EST) and explained what happened.

I think I did my part in trying to correct the situation and help another fellow witness in times of need. My suggestion would be for your operators to hang around in the witness chat server and get known. Perhaps even vote for other witnesses and make friends. This is a social network after all!

I wish you good luck and please share your learned lessons. (Practically I'm thinking about the scripts...)