If you are not using @neander-squirrel's @ginabot notification service, you are doing it wrong. Hint, if you are a Steem witness and not using GinaBot, you are missing out on a lot!

I have been using a notification service since the early days of using Steemit. I first started using SteemWatch which was useful but had a lot of bugs and speed issues at the time. I believe they have fixed most of the issues since then. I discovered @ginabot a few months ago before it was released to the general public and have been hooked ever since.

What the heck is @ginabot and why should I care?

@ginabot is a Discord bot made by @neander-squirrel that notifies you when certain events happen.

Currently, you can be notified of the following events on Steem:

• Comments to you, from you, deleted
• Transfers to and from you
• Inbound, Outbound, and Return of Delegation (New Feature)
• Mention of specific user (yourself or someone else
• Resteems
• Follow
• Votes for you, upvotes, downvotes, canceled vote (or any combination)
• New Post from a specific user(s)
• Blacklist a user or tag (read below why this is critical)
• Word Watch
• New Posts with a specific tag
• Witness approval or disapprove votes
• Witness Missed Blocks (New Feature)

I know a few more features are being added, for example being notified when you recover from a missed block.

@neander-squirrel is a single developer working on this project but is responsive and helpful in getting new features added. It is a free service and even the 0.001 verification registration is returned after a user has been verified. He is even talking about making it available to users without even 0.001 for verification.

How do I use @ginabot

I couldn't live without @ginabot and if it didn't exist, I would be using a mix of my own tools as I like to know what is going on.

I do not use all the features of @ginabot, as too much noise makes it less effective. In fact, I only use a few of the available features to minimize the chatter but keep me up to date with what is important.

I currently use the following features:

• Change in Incoming and Outgoing Delegation as well as return of delegation
• Mentions (for multiple user accounts)
• Incoming Downvotes
• Blacklist (I heavily use this feature, and could not use @ginabot until it was added, see below)
• Witness Vote, both approval, and disapproval
• Missed Block Notification

Although this is only a few of the features of @ginabot, it gives me the most important details I need on a daily basis without overwhelming me with low-value information.

One feature I requested early on that I could not live without is the blacklist. This allows you to blacklist user accounts from triggering the mention user functionality. The reason this is important to me is my username is mentioned by a few user accounts on a daily basis related to various projects. There are also very spammy accounts that frequently mention my name as well as bots. A good example is our daily Curation Digest on @buildawhale where I am mentioned on a daily basis. There is no reason I need to be notified of that. I also blocked spammy accounts like monitorcap and trafficmonitor from triggering the notification.

Whenever I receive a notification for a particular user more than once, I will typically add it to the blacklist unless it is something unique. Knowing what is going on is critical to me, but noise is counterproductive. I also blacklist myself, although I don't talk about myself much, I do link my witness in the footer of my posts.

One of the new features recently added is to be notified of any change in a delegation, this is a great feature to know when things change. It doesn't quite replace my own notifications that I created. For most people, it is more than enough.

One thing I like about @ginabot is the ability to register multiple user accounts and use a single Discord user to receive those notifications. For example, I have notifications for @buildawhale linked to my primary Discord account as well as my primary user account @themarkymark (Oh look, there's that blacklist feature doing its job!)

For votes, I only care about downvotes notification. This allows me to know within 30 seconds of an incoming downvote.

Witness missed blocks is a new feature that was added that works far faster and more reliable than #witness-blocks on Steemit Chat. In fact, the witness features are so damn good that every witness should be using it. I have personally got a few witnesses using it who have since said it is freaking amazing. It currently will not tell you when you recover from a missed block but it will really soon. [Insert Soon Emoji]

Example notifications

How to setup @ginabot

First head over to Minnow Power Discord server. You will need to join the #registration channel or you can just message GINAbot#0609directly.

From there you want to issue the following command to verify ownership of your account:
..reg your_user_name

You will then be asked to send 0.001 SBD or STEEM to @ginabot with a set of numbers in the memo field. Once you have done this, you will be instantly notified you have been registered and presented with a link you can use to change your notification options. You can also get the settings link by typing in ..set steemit_username in private to ginabot Discord user.

Clicking on the link will send you to a webpage that looks like this:

Be sure to click save at the bottom to confirm your selections

That's all there is to it, it is very fast. Typical notifications are within 10 seconds of an event happening. Witness votes show how close you are to leveling up, and mentions give you a clickable link directly to the post or comment.

One feature I have requested that is being worked on is the ability to set a threshold for Steem votes as well as witness votes so votes under a certain threshold do not notify you. This will be really helpful as many votes are less than 1 Steem Power.

If you want to register multiple users on a single Discord account you just need to type ..reg username to register a new Steem user. Transfer the verification 0.001 SBD from the correct Steem user and you will be notified of your main Discord user account when complete. You can then use ..set username to get the settings page of the correct Steem user.

You do not need to use Minnow Power's Discord server and can do all transactions directly to Discord user GINAbot#0609 directly.

ginabot is a completely free service that costs @neander-squirrel a lot of time and money to create and maintain. He is also very humble and won't charge a dime or ask for money. If you find it helpful and eventually depend on it, consider donating Steem or Steem Power to @neander-squirrel. I have in the past and will do so again in the future. After one day of using ginabot, you will wonder how you survived without it!

More cool features are being worked on and will be announced as they as released. Consider following @ginabot on Steemit to be notified of new changes and show your support.

I also nominate @neander-squirrel for Suesa's 500 SP contest on my behalf.

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