Hi Steemit!

It's a wonder I made it out this week alive, it's has been a stressful week.

First the standard fare, I run two witness nodes as primary and secondary as well as auxiliary servers. For a short while, I had three witness nodes running while making some changes. Everything is back to normal and no blocks were missed during the migrations. I have a remote kill-switch (fail-over) and price feed running on the auxiliary servers.

As always, you can find me on Steemit.chat in #witness and #witness-social. I am also now the official witness for #steemusa. You will find me hanging out there as well.

Witness Hardware

Witness Nodes

32GB Ram
1000MB/s SSD
Quad-Core Xeon Processors
Geographic Redundancy (USA & Canada)

Auxiliary Servers

8GB Ram
1000MB/s SSD
Dual-Core Xeon Processors

Witness Position

This week I had a major boost in position from #63 to #40. Although I had some good size witness votes this week, the primary driver was Hive account@pumpkin's vote.

I appreciate everyone who votes for me and I will continue to do my best to be a positive influence to STEEM and the community.

Scams & Abuse

One of the biggest events this week was exposing the Hive account@bellyrub scam going on which a lot of people lost a lot of money. You can read my original post here. Hive account@neoxian has set up a compesation fund to help users who lost money from the "bellyrubbank".

Do not send money to Hive account@bellyrub or Hive account@bellyrubbank

If you have money in the bellrubbank, check out the compensation fund project. Hive account@neoxian is offering 30% reimbursement and in some cases 100%.

If you have been on Steemit for any amount of time, you probably have run into the spam created by Hive account@monitorcap, Hive account@vertical, Hive account@appbliz, Hive account@trafficmonitor, and Hive account@markboss. The combination of these accounts creates almost 2,000 comments/posts a day of endless spam. Yesterday I flagged 10 of their posts a made a post asking Steemians to come together to put a stop to it. Together we were able to bring Hive account@monitorcap to -1 reputation, effectively muting the account.

As of right now, it looks like Hive account@monitorcap has ceased the endless spam and hasn't posted in 6 hours. They typically post every 5 minutes or so.

As of right now, it looks like Hive account@monitorcap, Hive account@trafficmonitor, and Hive account@appbliz has ceased the 150-900 posts/day each. Hive account@markboss and Hive account@vertical are still posting at full speed and still have a positive reputation.

Hive account@cryptomonitor also continues to post every five minutes and is believed to be the ringleader of this mess. He is sitting pretty with 63 reputation while making a few hundred posts a day.

Unfortunately, we can mute them by bringing them to -1 reputation, but we cannot stop them from posting an average of 230+ posts a day.

Donations

I donated 200 STEEM to Hive account@patrice to increase Hive account@mack-bot's effective power to combat spam and abuse on the platform like Hive account@monitorcap. Although I am only a minnow myself, I did really well with the Hive account@bellyrub post and offered to donate to the Hive account@compensationfund but it was agreed between Hive account@neoxian and myself Hive account@patrice would be a better fit. If you do not know Hive account@patrice, she is a key player in Hive account@steemcleaners and created Hive account@spaminator and Hive account@mack-bot. She is also a witness who has my vote.

I always like to end my posts with something different. Here are some sugar cookies we decorated the other day.

And here is our little cookie thief

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