RE: The importance of the upcoming hardfork and how you can cast your vote!
I urge you to update your post to remove misinformation. :) The 0.17.0 release will not hard fork the network. Although as of now, if you don't have your sources from a previous build, 0.16.x can't be built because a necessary repository was removed.
Edit: 0.16.x may be available on Github again soon.
Edit2: I've downvoted this post because I don't believe Steem should reward misinformation about itself. I also find the ranking of the witnesses has been tailored in a meaningless way to put yours on top. Missed blocks is only a useful statistic when compared to the number of successfully created blocks.
Further, as @gtg said, the versions 0.16.2 and 0.16.3 have no impact on running a witness node. 0.17.0 is functional but will not hard fork the network, which requires 17 non-miner witnesses running it in a round after 21 March 2017 15:00:00 UTC to switch over. As only witnesses below the top 19 are running it, there can only be one 0.17.0 DPOS node per round, in the backup slot.
@pfunk The ranking was not meaningless in anyway. It was sorted by version, then by missed.
That's not a meaningless number, whether it is cumulative over the life of the witness or not, it's there. If a better way is ratio of missed to found, so be it, but that would have required additional calculations and I simply pulled the data in raw and did a sort.
Yes it's a comparison of my node vs the others. But that's because we support HF 17 while many others do not.
The question is how many actually don't want the changes and how many are on just still on autopilot? Our participation rate isn't exactly the greatest lately.
Also why are people still voting for nodes running 0.15 or 0.14 those nodes are not generating valid blocks, so in that way it is a wakeup call.
Additionally, the only say many people have in the day to day operations of this place is their witness vote. They should make sure they're still voting for witnesses that still represent what they steem to be.
This isn't misinformation. It's factual and based on the correct reading of the data. At the time of my post there were not enough non-miner witnesses to make HF 17 happen and I wanted to let people know who is and who is not running it and maybe wakeup some of the people who were opposed and invite them to see it from a different perspective.
I also wanted to explain why I changed out all my votes, and how people can use the proxy function to vote and why.
If even on person learned something new, then I've done my job as a witness here.
I just don't see the reason for the downvote. But you're entitled to vote your conscience.
I thought I explained it pretty well. You can see who responded to the survey as shown in liondani's post and the turnout was remarkably good for being done during the weekend.
Misinformation:
This ignorant statement combined with the features you listed before it is insinuating that the top of the (actual, stake weighted, not arbitrarily ordered) witness list are against these features. The changes are not the ones at issue.
More misunderstanding, confusion:
If the nodes were still running after the previous hardforks, they were forked off. Nobody made a new block past the hardfork time. They are all gone, and only listed on witness ranking lists because they have approval votes for them still. Dan used that account presumably to test the witness plugin in new versions of Steem. The version is not an indicator of the node still running, it's just the version of Steem that last produced a valid block.
More ignorance:
There is not one witness I know of who does not want to upgrade to a reasonably featured HF17. This means no comment pool, for the most part, and abuse mitigation of the 7 day payout.
The top end of the witness list are trying their best to make Steem the best it can be. You're not helping that with this post.
Right so like I said, why are people still voting for them? Are they aware that they are still voting for them? Hopefully this post woke them up and reminded them.
Which is not the same thing as supporting it in it's current incarnation and that is the point I am trying to get across.
Sure top witnesses got together and decided collectively not to accept this but to accept a subset of HF17 if SteemIt Inc decides to go that route, but I'm not seeing anything from Steemit Inc endorsing that viewpoint. In fact did anyone notice the image @steemitblog used in their post on the subject? It's a dog being trained to stay with a cheeto on it's nose. Does that not tell you anything?
Frankly I like the comment pool and the abuse mitigation thing seems to my mind an edge case that can be worked out at a later date. But my voice as a witness is drown out in the cacaphony because even though I'm spending the same amount of money each month on hardware/software to run a witness, I don't yet have enough stake to be in the top tier and thus doesn't matter and yes you literally just said that.
You're also saying the top witnesses collectively decided they don't like the comment pool. But where's the user's voice in this? The people who are actually impacted by this, the people who use the site and comment?
Frankly I believe that this posting helps witnesses overall, because logically the only way to be a top witness is to support the vision of steem the majority want to see. Right now that's an economic majority, but eventually this will be a simple majority as the distribution smooths out. So why not let people know about these issues?
Now people are aware there was even a process to make a decision like that and that they can vote for witnesses who support(ed) the features they wanted to see.
I'm not wrong here, I'm just in the minority of opinion in terms of our stake weighted voting system.