Today we take a break from guild vote nominations to bring you another edition of the Steemvoter Week In Review newsletter. This is an opportunity to highlight winning SV Guild picks from the previous week. Since post payouts happen at the end of a 7-day window, we feel it's fair to give our winners one more chance at getting some recognition before their payout periods close. These are hand-picked community recommendations that you won't want to miss!

In addition, we'll share any updates that the owners of Steemvoter care to pass along plus a Tip of the Week for getting the most out of the Steemvoter service.

Hard Fork 19 Reminder

By now, most of you should hopefully be aware that the Steem network recently upgraded to HF 19. A hard fork is basically an upgrade to the core software protocols upon which Steemit runs. This particular one had a big effect on voting power as explained in this official blog post.

The gist of it is that a full strength vote at 100% is much more powerful than before, but also drains your account's voting power much quicker. To avoid depleting your voting power too fast, you should change your Steemvoter rules to vote at 1/4 the strength you used previously (assuming you want to continue voting at about the same relative strength as before the hard fork). For example, if you have a rule to vote at 100% strength, you should change it to 25%.

Of course you are free to leave your rules at 100% if that's working out well for you. Each person's circumstances will be different so mileage may vary.

Bulk rule updates

We recognize it can be slow and tedious to change the voting power of all your voting rules if you have a lot of them. So for anyone who has 30 rules or more, feel free to reach out to us on Steemit Chat or by commenting on this post, and we will happily update all your rules for you as a courtesy service. Simply let us know what % strength you want all your rules updated to.

Note: don't ask us to do this if you have less than 30 rules! We reserve the right to reject trivial requests.

Without further ado, we present... drum roll please...

Last week's guild vote winners

I think of myself not just as a dreamer, but as a dream chaser. by @cantribute

This is the #introduceyourself post for a Dutch IT manager named Oscar. By way of introducing himself he provides a summary of his first posts so you can get an idea of what he'll be writing about. These include such topics as simple explanations of blockchain technology, flying a drone outside Las Vegas, advice about leadership, and observations on international relations for those who perform business on a global scale. Welcome to Steemit @cantribute , we hope you have a great time here!

What I wanted / You didn't want by @businesswri

In this soothing, meditative post @businesswri tries his hand at poetry and provides a lovely sound track to go with it. It's packed with longing & heartache, with just a dash of inspiration mixed in for good measure. We love the beautiful nature scenes provided as imagery to drive the words home. Keep that creativity flowing @businesswri. Steem on!

An open source strong password generator program for steemians [repost] by @royalmacro

This post will appeal to all you programmers & techie types out there. Living up to his username, @royalmacro presents the source code for a Visual Basic program to generate strong passwords for web site logins from a master seed key. He does it tutorial style so you can follow along and build the project for yourself. A download link is included at the end of the post. What a great open source initiative!

Steemit can be a game changer in the eradication of unemployment by @maya7

Steemian @maya7 is from India and worries about the unemployment situation in her country. In this post she describes the tensions and frustration permeating vast swathes of the Indian population. This is an important topic, a challenge facing not just India but many places around the world. We hope Steemit can go a long way toward enriching and lifting up the lives of those who are in need. Thanks for your efforts to raise awareness @maya7!

How to deal with human malice .. by @zkalemiss

This article gives advice for getting through trying circumstances caused by, shall we say, the degenerates of society whom we hope stop contributing to the evolutionary gene pool. Or to use a term that any social media user should understand, trolls. If you've ever been the victim of bullying, then this motivational post is for you! Thanks for being a good therapist @zkalemiss.

3 Writing Hacks Every Steemit User Must Know! by @looftee

What ingredients go into a successful post? @looftee aims to tell you by sharing a few essential tricks of the trade that, with a bit of practice, anyone can use to improve their blogging skills. These tips include using a catchy title to draw in the reader, focusing on quality content, and backing up factual information with credible sources. We give this advice two thumbs up; it does make a difference!

Steemvoter Service Update

We've been very busy over the past couple weeks working on scaling out our service to support the unprecedented levels of growth Steemvoter has experienced since the start of May. Many of you have probably experienced delayed votes at times, especially during peak posting periods or with super popular authors, but performance should be noticeably improved now as we brought 2 new voting servers online last week. We will continue to add new servers in the weeks & months ahead, as well as using software tricks such as multiple processes to eke out even more performance gains across our existing infrastructure.

Our scaling solution works by splitting Steemvoter users out amongst each of our voting servers to achieve a form of load balancing. Each server handles the votes for only its assigned group of users, using a voting script that sequentially applies votes for each user as voting rules are triggered. This script runs once every 4 minutes, which is how long it typically takes to apply all votes under ideal circumstances. So your votes might not be applied at exactly the time specified in your rules; it could be off by a minute or two depending on when in this 4 minute cycle your rule triggers. The timing in your rules should be interpreted as more of a rough guide than an exact measure; an ideal that the voting script strives to achieve but can never perfectly match.

The following diagram illustrates our current architecture, which can easily be expanded as we continue to ramp up:

User allotment above is for illustrative purposes only and does not depict the actual distribution of Steemvoter users across the real servers.

The sequential nature of the voting script is why votes were getting so delayed before we added the new servers. With so many new users, it simply took too long for one complete loop of the script to finish executing and those 4 minute cycles started getting stretched out. But now with 3 servers running in parallel, one complete voting run finishes 3 times faster, bringing us back within our 4 minute cycle.

Tip of the Week - correctly entering author names

There have been a few support issues recently with new users puzzled when their rules didn't work, appearing to silently fail and not vote as expected. It turns out the reason is that author names were not entered properly in the Steemvoter rule editor.

When you enter the Author name (the person whose posts will be voted on), you must enter it exactly as shown on the Steemit web site, but without the @ character. Here's an example of properly setup voting rules:

The best way to make sure you get it right is to copy & paste from the Steemit URL. For example, let's say you wanted to add a voting rule for @aggroed. His wallet page looks like this:

A common newbie mistake would be to setup a voting rule for "Aggroed", since that's how it appears in the wallet profile. But that would be wrong. It should be "aggroed". When in doubt, simply copy & paste from the URL at the top of your browser window:

Be sure to avoid these 3 mistakes, all of which are taken from real support queries dealt with recently:

1. Don't capitalize the username:

2. Don't copy the whole URL:

3. Don't include the @ sign:

Yes, we understand it's kind of anal to differentiate between capitalized & lowercase spellings. @cryptomancer will soon be implementing a simple change to our rule matching engine to get rid of that distinction & make the system more forgiving of such things.

And that's it for this edition of the Steemvoter Week In Review. We wish all of you a great week ahead!

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Steemvoter is an automatic voting service that votes on your behalf according to rules you set. You can control who the service votes on, how much voting power is used, and when to vote. Steemvoter will work for you 24 hours a day, so you never miss voting on your favorite authors! Sign up for free at https://steemvoter.com/

Image credits: screen shots and Steemvoter logo are courtesy of the Steemvoter team. All other images in this post, including the calendar in the title, are taken from Pixabay and used under Creative Commons CC0

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Previous Review Posts for your reading pleasure:

Post	Tip of the week
Steemvoter Week In Review for June 5 - 10	Another way to check VP
Steemvoter Week In Review for May 27 - June 4	Monitor the curation rewards on your account with Steemdb.com
Steemvoter Week In Review for May 21 - 26	Hardfork impact on Voting and Vote Power
Steemvoter Week In Review for May 13 - 20	Conserving voting power
Steemvoter Week In Review for Apr. 22 - 29	Max voting rule limit
Steemvoter Week In Review for Apr. 16 - 21	Sorting Rules by Column Headers
Steemvoter Week In Review for Apr. 9 - 15	Fixing posting key errors

Should you require any assistance please contact @thecryptodrive or @cryptomancer in the #steemvoter.com channel on steemit.chat.

A witness vote for our co-owner @thecryptodrive would be much appreciated if you can spare it. Thank you so much!

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Please support P.A.L and @minnowsupport by joining their Discord group, it's an amazing community that uses Steemvoter to grow its member base.

EDIT: apologies for using the introduceyourself tag, this seems to have been added due to some bug in the Steemit editor and we are unable to get rid of it.