The true objective of the script was just to upvote any user who voted for a flexible ideal witness set. Additional restrictions were put on so that it doesn't rewards NSFW content, and try to limit upvoting low valued posts. Additional features were also added after the original objective was made to enhance it's offerings. I'll call it a prototype for convenience.
The bot is more or less a prototype or proof of concept, so whoever with php and steem connect experience who wants to take it further can. Steemconnect is quite a hurdle for many new/wannabe steem developers.
As I kind of posted on discord in the notes:
It will look for the head block number, and reads the head block.
A block Should contain a transaction or transactions.
It will look for "comment" type transactions on the head block, and filter out so only looks to true posts. True posts are comments operations without a parent author....although sometimes they are just edits.
When it finds a true post (including an edit) it grabs the permlink and the author, and the tags.
At present, if it sees NSFW in the tags it says it is bad.
the permlink helps identify the post for out later transactions on the chain-if any-for upvoting and/or commenting.
With the author, it first calls up the raw reputation score and convert it to the form we recognize.
We can use this number to help omit potential junk/spammy posts.
At that point it it reads who a person vote for.
If it sees a tron witness, it says says that it is bad; the same flag is presently used as if it saw an NSFW tag.
It also counts the number of "good" witnesses.
In the prototype it is looking for 20 out of the 30 core witnesses.
So if it isn't NSFW, if it isn't voting for a tron witness, if they have a reputation greater than 50, if they voted for at least 20 core witnesses then the prototype will upvote that person. As the notes in the prototype code say they could copy a particular section and tell users why they are getting an upvote. Upon a successful upvote I was ready to concede the prototype was done. But wanted to test one extra feature for those who failed to have 20 witnesses which is the next part.
Optionally, and the prototype has this feature disabled by default, for people who voted for less than 20 core witnesses it posts a comment on their post kind of like the image above.
Ideally I should adjust it so it upvotes 5 minutes after it identifies a post to maximize rewards. There are a number of ways this could be done-one method would be to ensure a minimum weight to have a 5 minute cool down and upvote when the cool down expires;another method could mean buffering them into an array and each cycle checking the timestamp of the current array index and see if 300 or more seconds have passed; another method could just store it into a file/database and let another script handle it separately. Many ways of doing the same thing. But is it a start for a proof of concept. The script is getting buried, so I doubt any php developer will see it sadly.
I think we are on the same discord channel, if you want to see it. I am not sure what your background is in dapp or php development.
RE: how I will vote on steemfollower. And how Justin sun could lose the war, unless there is a quick powerdown.