MinnowBooster Update: Automated Upvote Buying is Officially a Breach of MB Terms of Service
Hello to all the minnows, dolphins, whales out there. We never thought things would come to this, but it appears automated buying of upvotes has increased dramatically in the recent weeks, perhaps months.
We have known for a while about "botting" - a term, which we have used for automated vote buying from us. But the scale of things, when digging deeper, surprises us. Thousands upon thousands of requests by bot owners, to buy upvotes.
We understand, that due to the popularity growth of Steemit, the demand for visiblity has also grown and even quite significantly, one could say. This, in turn, has reduced the availability of votes, that Minnowbooster can offer. So, user's might think - "why not use a bot for bot"? Let us clarify:
Minnowbooster is a bot, but we are a service for minnows, valued authors and a tool for visibility, not a field of easy profits. By hammering us with thousands of requests, botters make the situation with the availability of votes even worse, reducing other code-privy individuals to starting up their own automated vote-buying bots, which in turn creates another cascading snowball effect.
While it is probably true, that some of these thousands of requests are not malicious, hammering us with such an amount of unnecessary requests is not Ok with us. By reducing the availability of the votes for the customers who actually need or deserve them, you harm our clients and our business. And here we have to step in.
This is not a punishment - by blocking botters from our service, we have seen already an improvement on server performance load on our RPC nodes, better availability of votes, which all results in better business.
We urge people to use common sense when using our service. Steemit is a community for all and we will do our part to help the actual authors, who deserve some more exposure.
Keep in mind if you are caught botting your account will be banned and @MinnowBooster will no longer support your service requests, please take a moment to review our terms of service in regard to this activity.
As always we appreciate your understanding and support and are committed to making MinnowBooster a service exclusively focused on helping minnows grow!
Why choose @Minnowbooster?
Minnowbooster strives to provide a truly investor-class model for Steem investors who are either not good at curating content or do not have the time or inclination to do so and would prefer to earn a "Masternode-like" competitive APR return on investment with daily payouts, and simultaneously empowering the community and stimulating the attention economy of the Steem blockchain.
Thank you again for your continued support as we work on providing the most socially beneficial toolset on Steem.
Our team will continue to move forward to equip you with the services you need to succeed on Steem!
What can MINNOWBOOSTER do for you?!
| What? | Currency | Advantages |
|---|---|---|
| Buy upvote | SBD | Earn an instant return |
| Lease SP from market | STEEM | Increase your vote strength and curation rewards |
| Delegate SP to market | STEEM POWER | Earn daily STEEM dividends |
| Invest STEEM in MinnowBooster | STEEM | Earn daily SBD dividends |
| Delegate SP to MinnowBooster | STEEM POWER | Earn daily SBD dividends |
| Sell your vote to MinnowBooster | VOTING POWER | Earn SBD share of sells |
CURRENT PARAMETERS:
| Parameter | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum Upvote | 0.01 SBD | Minimum SBD you can send |
| Upvote comments? | Can Be Enabled | |
| Profit | Always Guaranteed! | Varies with SBD price, but always receive more than send. |
| Minimum Lease Purchase | 1 STEEM | |
| Maximum SP Lease / Steem | 1 STEEM/50 SP | Price per week/Lease size |
| Minimum SP Lease / Steem | 1 STEEM/400 SP | Price per week/Lease size |
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Missed the BuildTeam announcement? Here's all the juicy details.
Minnowbooster is a @buildteam project by @thecryptodrive (witness) @cryptomancer and @reggaemuffin (witness)
Visit our flashy new website minnowbooster.net!
This is a @steemvoter subscription payment post. Thank you to Steemvoter customers for allowing us to use your Steem accounts to upvote this post by virtue of your free subscription to the Steemvoter.com bot service. @steemvoter is proudly a @buildteam subsidiary and sister project to @steemsports and @minnowbooster.
Word up... I really appreciate your continued efforts to make your service work within an "ethical" framework.
I will have to say, due to the limited availability lately it has become quite hard to actually "hit" an available vote. Sending quickly repeated requests of the same kind to "catch" a vote eventually has been pretty much the only option lately.
I understand the likes of mine (probably triggering 10-20 requests [manually] within a minute) are probably not the problem you are referring to, but it does underline the problem, it's almost impossible to get a decent upvote purchased without acting 'bot-ish'.
I didn't use it a lot in last few months, because the available upvotes were only few cents. I am even giving my upvotes to the service and exchanging them for upvoting my comments, just because I can not use decent upvotes on my articles. I hope there will be a fix soon
A little update on the story... This morning I came to discover:
apparently it indeed is enough to act bot-ish manually, I didn't quite expect that.
Anyhow, I was pretty sure this was a false automatic detection so I headed over to the MB Discord to ask for instructions on how I could appeal the blacklisting and what to avoid in the future.
I was kicked off the Discord Server without any comment
I understand the tension is high and there are probably tons of appeals similar to mine right now stressing the mods to the limit, but really, that was just unprofessional...
To clarify... I am ~80SBD into my monthly limit and yesterday I did send the same 10SBD request probably 30 times over to get that one upvote on one post. I do that manually and I do not think my posts are being disqualified due to "quality" concerns.
I'd appreciate your comment on the situation.
Hang in there buddy. MB is going to announce sweeping changes to the vote market and take a big leap forward in the next few days!
ummm... ok?!
so does that mean my blacklist status has been revoked? Is there any way for me to join the discord again after being kicked out for no reason?
Same happened to me :( And I do not use bots.
Also I do not consider my posts as a spam although they are sort of short - mostly graphics made by me (i'm not so fluent in english - its hard for me to create longer posts)
Well... blacklisted or not I will carry on. C'ya!
Your wallet looks very suspicious!
Then check out my blog, it's really nice, friendly, open and you're welcome :)
Do you mean the getting blacklisted or the kicked off discord without any comment part?!
I totally understand that a blacklisting can happen, but I am a bit shocked to get thrown out the door for asking about it, without any correspondence at all.
A was blacklisted while sending bids
I usually send quickly many requests from 0.04 to 1 SBD
You know: send / backspace /change SBD value / send again/ repeat
It may look like bot's work :)
I hope blacklisting will be temporary or revised.
If not ... oh well, tough luck :)
P.S.
LOL, I didn't expected sending 10SBD or even more is legit and brings effects :)
ah ok... well i guess that's not really a poblem then... as I said, blacklisting can happen for many reasons.
I really appreciate their effort to weed out spam and abuse, so a zealous blacklist is great imho. It's when you get thrown out for just trying to appeal, without being given any comment... that's where I think things start going wrong.
10 SBD works... there are a few big vote sellers on minnowbooster, they are hard to catch, and so yes, it takes repeated attempts similar to what you're doing at the right time to get these.
So I guess I did that too much?! I usually buy a vote every second day or so... it's really not that much compared to what i see others doing on much less original posts (well I guess that's subjective.... but anyways...)
Feel free to join the discord room again and inquire about MB service and your account again if you'd like..
yeah... well, the invite links in the MB posts all seem to have expired? Do you have one for me that works?
Well, I do not know if 10 SBD is too much. Actually "The Steemmarket" will adapt and adjust itself. I often see people bids much higher. I thought you just have no chance to "win" upvote this high. I thought only minnows with small voting power sells their votes to minnowbooster. But thinking this over.... Whales can sell their votes too. It makes sense. Lol I'm constantly learning :).
From my point of view:
Minnowbooster is ok (although it blacklisted me <no hard feelings, they can do what they want >) In my case MB helped me to gain reputation and gain some voting power.
I truly believe that making good content is the best way to succeed on Steemit.com, but with no reputation and no followers you can stick your GREAT CONTENT up "Y.A."
That is why MB is a great tool to make a change
You can cite me.
No, you can't.
I 've just copyrighted this slogan.
And I'm shipping t-shirts worldwide.
Everybody grab your hands and sing along!:
krkrkr... lol
yeah... let's heal the world alright :D
Getting kicked out is pretty unprofessional. I've been a big fan of minnowbooster and now I'm just disappointed. If you don't mind waiting to get white-listed try smartsteem
I'm not sure you have much to say about this @vimukthi as your clearly an abuser in addition to fraenk... I'm sure getting kicked out of discord was a mistake but considering you guys have both abused the system I don't think you have much to say at this point that will make you look credible or make people feel sorry for you...
Here's a sample of the suspicious behavior i found in your wallet just a minute ago for other folks to see...
They are all manual transfers. I don't even have enough knowledge to code a bot. I re-send my transfers because they keep coming back with the same message. It didn't used to be like this.
I used to just check the graph and send a bid. But I haven't seen a value above 0.5 SBD in weeks. Getting an upvote is pretty much like a gamble. I have to try many times to get an upvote.
Even though the message say to look at the chart most of the time only about 0.1 votes are available. I do not stare at the charts all the time. So I may have missed some.
I assure you that all transfers were 100% manual.
sorry... did you just say I am "clearly an abuser" or did I read that wrongly?!
fair play. get rid of those who abuse the system. I'm new to steemit and have been watching this argument closely....
Keep it up so content stands out by itself...
nice way plugging your ref-link ;)
You can try Smartsteem white list only bot as long as you have decent content although you'd have to wait until your posts are manually reviewed for higher value votes.
(The link is a referral)
and now it looks like ref-link-spam!
Sorry if it annoyed you. I was kind of pissed by the out of nowhere ban even though all transfers were manual. Though of letting people know about the competition. I used to think of 2 services as pretty much equals. The inaccurate bot detection Vs White-list only made Smartsteem look much better now.
Yeah, I feel you... but I think it's generally not a nice practice to deploy referral links without clearly marking them as such.
It did seem like an obvious thing as I habitually read the link before clicking it. Edited it to make it dummy proof.
Actually I did use @smartsteem already twice or so.
I didn't know that they judge my posts before upvoting O_0. Respect2them!
I thought no one cares. They upvoted, so they liked apparently. :)
same thing happened to me, i wanted to get a big upvote so i followed minnowbooster's voting power, and when the power came to 57% i knew its going to start voting, so i kept sending one after another, because i missed it before, and this day was the last to take vote on that particular post. i did it manually in the website, i get it that i shouldn't have done that, but as you said its really hard to get a big upvote,
and i got blacklisted,
then i was kicked off the discord server....
now, lets see if i can get on smartsteems whitelist........
minnowbooster was the best though
The same thing just happened to me. It was near impossible to get a vote and I had to try over and over. Suddenly I get a message saying: We currently refuse to make business with you! We'll stop refunding in 9 attempts
That's when I came in and saw this post. I'm one of the 67 accounts with 3 stars on smartsteem white list. I buy all my votes manually and even that's near impossible getting a decent upvote is like winning a lottery. Then I got banned.
well... but the point here really is... a zealous blacklist is fine... but dropping customers without comment isn't. I'm fine with ending up on a blacklist... and i'd try to talk to them before making a racket on some public post...
but i got kicked off their discord without comment... THAT's the issue here!
They do need some good communication. I simply came across this post after seeing a memo that read: We currently refuse to make business with you! We'll stop refunding in 9 attempts
I probably overacted as it seemed like I was being accused of making a bot when I don't even know how to code one. I don't know how the algorithm works. They didn't even included a warning or even a reason in the memo they sent. I was just confused and then a little pissed.
Communication is key. No warnings or even parameters (like only X transfers within Y hours) were given. I was trying hard to get an upvote and the next thing I know is the above mentioned memo.
Yeah... i guess tensions are high right now. Their new auto-detection is arguably very sensitive and MANY users have been blacklisted.
Now this certainly helps to weed out the hundreds (thousands) of abusing farm accounts and that's certainly a good thing for the community in the end.
I was already able to clear my name and have access to their service and their discord again, but it took quite some initiative as the mods are fighting with hundreds of appeals right now.
I support their intentions. It's just the execution. Their algorithm clearly wasn't well coded. I'm no programmer but I don't think there would have been this many false detection if it was well written. Maybe they simply checked transfer frequency and flagged the accounts.
The worst thing was communication. The 40 SBD limits were well set and well communicated. This current mess clearly wasn't.
I also got the same message just now - We currently refuse to make business with you! I havent been abusing there service - anyone had any luck trying get off the so called 'blacklist?'
Contact them on discord. Give them your account link and explain what happened.
https://discordapp.com/invite/2zC7sf?utm_source=Discord%20Widget&utm_medium=Connect
How does all this work I'm so confused I want to invest but Everytime I try to it won't transfer my funds
minnow what is the price of your mom pussy for one night ?
i wanna buy
tell
me
fast
I'm agree with you that bot to buy upvotes are not correct but I think you set your level of request too low because I just have been also blacklisted while I did only manual requests...
"Vote request failed! You have been blacklisted!"
When we receive a message as below, what is the problem to send one or several new requests with another amount to try to match ? :
refund: Sorry, we could not upvote you with *** ⇒ $****, please try a different amount. Our website https://www.minnowbooster.net has a graph with what sends are currently working.
Please tell us what we can do to have again access to your services as I never used bot to buy upvotes. I'm just using your website with your internal wallet.
Automated upvotes are destroying the Steem Blockchain it is MinnowBooster's job to be a custodian and practice responsible behavior in terms of facilitating votes. Stay tuned for new improvements and if you feel you have been unfairly blacklisted and you upvote QUALITY content then drop by the discord and and leave your steemit URL for review! Thanks!
They just block people from their discord channel, even before they got a chance to prove they are innocent. Im pretty sure it meant to be innocent until prove guilty but it the other way round and they dont give a shit who they block or they are just bad developers that cart create a system that cart detect bots properly.
Do you want these guys to just pat you on the back when you abuse their service and break their TOS?? Look at a screen shot from your wallet sir and think about who is in the wrong... Pretty sure it is you @liaminit!
How is that breaking the rule, all i did is brought some SB because i did not have any at all and when i had more post i wanted to upvote them but didnt have enough so i brought more, what am i meant to do get SB out of thin air to use the service. This service is very misleading and i thought this service is to help people to get notice, but i guess not. Also blocktrades is an exchange not an account. So stop trying to make me look bad
Stop crying and go elsewhere....
im also blacklisted.i am not using any bot.i just buy upvote from minnowbooster website and wallet.
@minnowbooster please ans me.many of not using any bot but you banned them.im use manual, but why banned me..
@cryptopassion
@sou1iane
@lovehaswon
@dera123
@fkzgr
we need once chance.we didn't use any bot.please unbanned us.and give permission again use your service.
This comment has received a 0.35 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @alex12.
Same here i been blacklisted for no reason and when i try and prove i wasn't a bot they just blocked me from their discord. It seems to me that they dont care who they block and just complete bad support
Actually no you were banned because you blantently abused the system, broke TOS and were rude! But nice effort trying to spread lies... You own a farming account. I encourage everyone reading this to look @liaminit's posts and see for yourselves!
How was i farming i was only upvoting my own post to get notice, i do not get why you think im farming and yea i reinvest my earning but there is nothing wrong in that. If i was farming i think there would be a better way to do that then use this service. Also i never was rude so stop spreading lies, i got screenshot to prove i wasnt rude
Also there is a 40SB daily limit, so if you say im sending excessive amounts thats just plain stupid, i honestly not intended to farm and i honestly dont know why you thinking that, all because i brought some Sb from an exchange and sent it to minnowbooster. People do things differently from others doesnt mean they are doing something wrong.
Same here. :(
They say, I am using upvote bot, but I am not. I was doing it manually. THEY SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED OR MADE THIS CLEAR ABOUT HOW MANY TIMES WE SHOULD ASK FOR UPVOTE A DAY.
Many people got into blacklist even though we are not using any bot. This is not fair.
That's right. I have to say but minnowbooster has been doing really really bad moves lately. It started with their stupid update that made the graph definitely incorrect and now their program supposed to be for anti-bot is hurting those innocent users like you. That's why I'm starting to like smarsteem more.
This is the same problem that I have. I was called an abuser because I repeatedly sent SBD to the bot as they kept returning. There were no warnings or even parameters. I don't know how this blacklist was made. I didn't send repeated bids when the chart was working. I don't even know how to code a bot. I did manually sent about 10 bids in about 20 mins. Guess it was above the limit(which nobody informed me of)
Even bots won't send that far... (Bots can send faster but they won't do it because it's a very suspicious move.) I think sending 5 bids in an hour is overdoing it.
But that's just my opinion maybe because I don't like posting many posts a day and I consider it spamming depending on quality.
My point is, 10 bids in 20 minutes would seem a bot work to anyone who checks the wallet without checking the posts that were voted.
He is absolutely right, he used the same way with several amounts to see if he gives me an ascending vote. That has not been added, but I have been added to the blacklist, when I only use the manual purchase of votes. I should solve this. Otherwise, all users will be on the blacklist. @cryptopassion @techblogger
I've got to say the behavior on your account looks very suspicious as well! Clearly MB is doing something right spotting lots of suspicious activity... From your wallet I can see you have several accounts... Farming perhaps? How many accounts do you own 3? 5? Care to explain these recent activities?
I do not understand what you mean by "Agriculture maybe?" I have only one account for almost a year, the ones shown here are @roseri (my sister) @ismael (my brother in law) @etnique (family) .. In my family, I am in charge of changing the SBD or STEEM to the currency local. You can see in the transactions that the same amount of STEEM that I transferred was the same as that transferred to the service @Change an account of @cervantes. In the same way, the account of @mlaura is a friend who did him the favor.
And the transfer to @etnique has nothing to do with @minnowbooster.
If you are so kind, you can verify each of the accounts that you consider suspicious.
I'm even using the leasing service they offer.
By the way, good idea of the catcha system they implemented. I hope to continue using the service.
I can say this can happen, and not necessarily suspicious.
I'me too, in the charge of about 4 users money when they want to turn them into local currency (My brother, two sisters and a friend of family who is also in charge of his brother.) Because they aren't technical they tell me whenever they want to use SBD for something and sometimes I find it easier to use them through my own account.
Don't know if that is considered farming.
By the way @osmerj: Farming and Not Agriculture is the when you make more than one account and use each one of them to get money then put all the money in one account to cashout. Like what you did.
@techblogger , take a look at my account and tell me your opinion on if I too am abusing. it seems like the other examples are transferring a bunch of funds between accounts, but I have been re-investing my post rewards. When I got banned, I had done 2 orders for minnow booster, but only 1 per. if you track the previous day, you'll notice that I only put in one order per post otherwise, and they technically didn't even go through.... Any insight would be great, because my intent is only to use the service, not to abuse it.
Thank you for your time!
Someone have a link to acces to minnowbooster discord channel because the link doesn't work
Same for me and I think there are many more who got blacklisted for requesting too fast. Just reduced the vote amount by 10 cent per request until it worked and well that was too fast for the bot detection ^^
I think they need to install a time limit between the requests
same here :\
i am photographer and i write my photo settings as long as possible. some of them i add poems. its not spam...
Yes, I am also been banned recently. There's is no clear mention why I am banned. I am manually sending bids.
It's time to change services I guess.
Sure, you can do that but if you post quality content its much easier to just drop by the discord and show your URL if you've been banned unfairly and you arent a spammer or scammer I'm sure they will take you off the blacklist!
well... I tried reaching out on discord and was instantly kicked off the server?!
what's up with that? Oh and all discord invites on your sites and posts are expired? Or did I actually get banned from re-joining, too?!
That was a pretty shitty experience guys!
P.S.: I left a comment on the top of this post with more detail on my case if you'd care to comment on that, I'd appreciate that a lot!
@fraenk I've taken your points to heart. I've got nothing left to say other than just leaving this screenshot of all the votes you bought. The system picked up your account and auto flagged it. Please join the discord again and we will fix this up.
lol... dude... double check that... exactly ONE vote is purchased... that's the peaceandlove one!
reggae voted me manually, ausbit has a follow vote on my account... You should be able to double-check your logs on which votes came through MB...
you're being pretty damn impolite with those assumptions... and I am actually not upset at all (well, maybe now i am a little bit)...
P.S.: Glad we cleared this up via discord eventually... just for the record: I am no longer blacklisted - I did not cheat - everything is hunky dory - MB is doing the right thing by being overly cautious!
I'm glad as well. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Sir, can you please recheck. I haven't used any automated bot for upvotes from Mb. I have just used usual Minnowbooster balance window. Please remove my account from that blacklist.
~Thank you!
Luckily I at least have bandwidth. Just think about minnows repeatedly getting the above message and running out of bandwidth.
I think setting up a recaptcha is enough to prevent from bot vote buying. If we can get upvote straight away, it is done and we don't need to try again and again. Lifting users from banning is necessary to maintain stability of minnowbooster.
My suggestion is lower upvote value a little bit, currently MB is the best promotion service in Steemit So everyone want to use MB. And also reconsider about comment promotion becuase people are using comment promotion more than post promotion. Comment promotion is using the auto promote feature, if we can use this in post promotion there will less request to server.
Will this change still drain my VP enough!?
Great to see this article and I have also noticed over the last few days that the actual amount of votes available over 0.01 is higher than normal which is good.
Thank you for the update and I really like the service you guys offer.
Many Thanks
Happy to read some insight info on what has been happening and how you guys are trying to improve things.
I think this will be one of the most important things to tackle in the next few months: how do we stop the pure 'money grabbing' without discouraging the creation of quality content...
OR: When and how will this fork happen (separation of BS spam posts and quality content)?
Resteemed!
Hi! Yesterday I got in the black list from MB, because I am supposed to use the bots to work. But it's not, I've never used them and I'm not going to. My queries were all made by hand. Their number is due only to the fact that it is very difficult to get any upvote. Schedule on your website https://www.minnowbooster.net very far from reality and it is very difficult to navigate on the real availability of votes. Information that the number of requests to the service is limited, I have not seen anywhere else. How many of them can be done, how often, etc. Please tell me (and others one), what can I do to again get access to your services, since I never used the bot to buy upvotes.I like your service very much and I would be happy to use it further. Thanks, @bigslick
Hi minnowbooster could I please have my slider back. It is no longer available in my account.
I eventually found the slider. Thanks for telling me you moved it!
Got blacklisted
After my comments was auto promoted is comment auto promo forbidden
My discord : sou1iane001#5241 your invitation link has expired
I sent 19.8 3 times and for another user minnowbooster didnt refund .. WHY is that????? refund my 60 sbds....