RE: Utopian bot VP analysis - 2 more rounds are available per year :)

As I expected, the sheet (not shXt) part might be the problem, data fetching may have some problem some times. By any chance, the sheet is filled out by human? then it's very prone to errors. If it's publicly accessible (I guess not), I'd like to see.

It's not publicly accessible, and most of the stuff in fetched by a bot. The mistakes that are made are mostly people spelling their name wrong, or just being careless and messing something up. I could probably make the code more robust to prevent this from having any effect, but I'm lazy!

The cronjob I guess, if it's every 1 minute, that may incur dup instances in the worst case, so it should be careful. I mean before it starts voting, if somehow the preparation steps takes long, the another instance can be called. Actually I thought that might be why you set it every 5 min to guarantee enough margin.

I've had problems with this in the past, and it's the reason why the code for pulling contributions into our spreadsheet only runs every ~2 minutes. It used to be 1 minute before, and because of the time it sometimes takes to connect to a node, it would result in duplicate contributions being pulled in, which was quite annoying. I might've recommended that Elear do the same with the bot, but I can't remember, so you may well be correct.

Haha, I actually saw that there are not many error checks in the code, but I try not to say in the post :) And if the problem doesn't occur for data fetching, it seems okay in general. You're a very sincere person :) I also realized that when I wrote my bot, there are so many unexpected errors due to Steemit API :( everything should be caught well :) And I totally understand, since I believe I'm lazier than you :)

I guess probably it might have been every one minute earlier, but due to that dup problem, it may have been changed to every 5 minutes. But still to be honest, this is a perfect solution. After all, it may need to use sleep & dup check routine. If I have some time, I'll submit PR, but may need some time. I've already spent too much time on Steemit :) But it's very enjoyable due to Utopian and people like you. These days are my kind-of second stage of steemit life. Thanks!