Today’s @steemitblog post is brought to you by the Steemit Applications team. In this post, we highlight some of the projects we’ve been working on over the past few weeks.

Signups

Making improvements to the signup system continues to be one of our top priorities. This past week, we made several improvements to our signup “admin portal,” which will allow us to approve or reject new users more efficiently.

Deploying RocksDB to Production

Alongside the blockchain team, we’ve been working to get the latest steemd changes into production, which includes the RocksDB implementation of the account history plugin.

RocksDB is a fast-on-disk data store with an advanced caching layer, which reduces latency when reading/writing to and from the disk, as it’s optimized for fast, low-latency storage. As described in the blockchain team’s recent update post, this will significantly improve the performance of the account history plugin by reducing the RAM requirements, improving the replay time, and decreasing the amount of disk space needed.

Improving Steemit.com Faster

We upgraded our existing developer build system for steemit.com (known as condenser) and several other internal repositories. These changes have no direct impact on users, but they increase our development efficiency by speeding up build times when compiling source code, running tests, and deploying code to production. This will enable us to iterate faster, thereby making steemit.com an even better experience in less time.

Inactive Account De-Delegation

Steemit.com is not like other social apps. You need a little bit of Steem Power in order to post to the Steem blockchain. It’s one of the ways we allow people to transact on Steem for free, while also preventing people who are not invested in the future of Steem from spamming the network.

Steemit Inc. delegates Steem Power to all newcomers who sign up via steemit.com in order to provide a good experience for new users and to ensure they have enough bandwidth to make their first few posts.

In order to ensure that as many people as possible have as much bandwidth as possible, we have implemented a system that temporarily un-delegates Steem Power from accounts that have been inactive for 90 days. We still leave enough Steem Power for them to resume posting once they return, and the same system returns the remainder of their allocated delegation within an hour of the account becoming active again.

De-Delegating Abusive Accounts

We have developed an open and transparent process for removing delegations from abusive accounts which have been deemed ineligible for Steem Power delegation from Steemit, Inc. due to faucet abuse and/or ToS violations. This process will in no way inhibit a legitimate user’s ability to post to Steem.

You can find and contribute to the open list of abusive accounts here:
https://github.com/steemit/redeemer-irredeemables

It’s important to note that all we are doing is removing our delegation from these accounts. We are not depriving anyone, even bad actors, from posting to the Steem blockchain; we are only removing their ability to do it with our Steem Power (and the corresponding bandwidth), which could be used to help create new accounts and give new users the bandwidth they need to transact on the Steem blockchain - be it on steemit.com or any of the growing list of Steem applications, which can be seen on steemprojects.com.

We encourage members of the community who are involved in combating spam and abuse to submit abusive users to this list, so we can revoke their Steem Power. Please understand though, that we only intend to revoke Steem Power from users who are undeniably violating our ToS or abusing the faucet sign up. If it’s a gray area, we will side with the user. All pull requests should include sufficient documented proof for a reviewer to conclude that an account is violating our ToS or abusing the faucet sign up.

Condenser (steemit.com) Changes

The option to share posts via Reddit was added to the blog post page. This was a community-submitted enhancement (pull request 2773) made by @netuoso.

Another community-submitted pull request from GitHub user Nicknyr fixed a layout bug that involved the search bar overlapping the login and signup buttons. The pull request can be found here.

Community member caleblogan (GitHub user) submitted a pull request to fix a display bug that occurred when a video link was on the same line as other text.

Steem Python Library and Jussi Updates

We’ve made several changes to improve our official Steem Python library (example issues 156 and 181), as well as Jussi, our json-rpc reverse proxy (example issues 150 and 154). These changes improve the tools that the development community uses, which will make it easier for application developers and entrepreneurs to build applications powered by Steem.

Want to contribute?

Steem (the blockchain) and condenser (the code for steemit.com, the social application that’s run on Steem) are both open source projects. You can view all of our GitHub repositories here: https://github.com/steemit/

If you can code, you can look under the hood and find issues to work on. For example, if you have HTML, CSS or JavaScript skills, you could help improve steemit.com by looking at issues in the condenser repo. A good place to start is with issues labeled “help-wanted.”

If you are a proficient developer and want to work on an idea of your own, you can open up a GitHub issue in the appropriate repository and start a conversation with our development team about the change you’d like to implement.

Thanks for reading!

Steemit Applications Team