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So.. WOW! What a way to start the new year. Unfortunately with that comes some headaches. Spam, Scam, General Abuse, and plain old GREED is up. Both @steemcleaners and @spaminator are working hard to combat it. The @steemcleaners team is doing a great job of keeping up with the reports.

I've added a new part time member to @spaminator. You'll see her commenting in response to human spam. These comments will not be flagged or tracked. They are an attempt to help curb the human spam element.

Yesterday @mack-bot flagged a record 2729 comments & posts. I don't know if I've talked about my strategy for using @mack-bot, @quarry, @prowler & @spaminator.

@mack-bot has a list of 'known' accounts. As soon as they post they receive a flag from @mack-bot. I then followup with a flag from @quarry 6.5 days later thanks to fellow witness @mahdiyari who set up a bot for me. Thanks to an anonymous supporter, I have @spaminator set up to followup @quarry's vote with one calculated to remove the payout.

There are a number of new accounts discovered every day added to these lists. I frequently run queries to catch any payouts on posts not flagged by @mack-bot or were missed due to node lag by spaminator. That's where I use @prowler. @spaminator is setup to automatically remove rewards for any post flagged by prowler as well.

This isn't a 100%. Especially when I don't catch new accounts created by @dart after they have paid out. @dart created 1488 new accounts in the month of December. That is up from the 800 accounts they created in November.

The number of posters using bots or posting more than 8 hours a day has significantly dropped. When I started 104 of these accounts made up 22% of the posts. There is now 16 accounts that make up 4.7% of the daily post volume.

Witness Update

I updated account creation fee to 0.10 STEEM.

Not much of a witness update. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and wish everyone a safe and prosperous New Year!

I drop by Steemitizens of Steem Show hosted by @sircork every Sunday if you have questions for me or want to talk with other members of the community about issues concerning steemit.

Witness Voting

You can vote for my witness here.

Wittnesses I vote for and support:

@abit	@guiltyparties	@someguy123
@aggroed	@jesta	@steemgigs
@anyx	@lukestokes.mhth	@swelker101
@arcange	@neoxian	@teamsteem
@ausbitbank	@netuoso	@themarkymark
@chitty	@nnnarvaez	@timcliff
@drakos	@pfunk	@wackou
@fubar-bdhr	@reggaemuffin	@good-karma
@ats-witness	@riverhead	@yehey
@gtg	@sircork	@followbtcnews

Image by @atopy

Current Projects:

@steemcleaners 🙣 @spaminator 🙣 @steemsugars

My Delegations: