Sorry for the mess...

Tl;dr: Yesterday, my post scheduler went crazy. I am sorry for the double septuple posts, my script has been fired.

Some days I am working 12-14 hours on TravelFeed while on others I am travelling and don't even touch my laptop, this is why post scheduling is awesome for me in order to share my photos regularly. As a developer, I am not using Steempeak or Steemauto to schedule my posts though, but my own script that has some cool features: It enables me to write my post from Lightroom, the software I use for managing and editing my photos, and to schedule not just posts, but also comments to participate in the awesome travel photo contests by @czechglobalhosts.

Unfortunately, the recent hardfork caused some unwanted behaviour. At the time when I developed the post scheduler, I naively believed that an immutable blockchain would mean reliable data, so instead of recording my posts locally, my script checked the contest posts by @czechglobalhosts for any existing comments by me to avoid double posting, which had the added advantage that it would detect any manual participation by me as well. Since the hard fork, the function get_replies in beem, the Python library I use, that is responsible for getting the comments of a post was having issues. I am currently using the pre-release version of beem and when testing everything worked fine, but it seems that I ended up with another node yesterday that was returning empty data. Lesson learned: The blockchain may be immutable, but Steem nodes are a mess and should not be relied on.

On top of that, I did not follow the changelogs of beem closely enough to notice that the behaviour for existing posts must have changed recently. Before, when posting with an existing title/permlink, beem would update the old post, preventing accidental double posts but causing an often unwanted behaviour. Now, beem posts are using a new permlink instead, resulting in a new post being created each time. I did not realise that this failsafe was no longer working.

To make it worse, my automations do not only post on Steem, but also share my photo and Steem(it) post to several other social networks. I want to thank everyone who did not unfollow me immediately but alerted me of my account posting like crazy and will now start answering messages and removing the double posts.

I have downvoted my double posts, feel free to do the same to remove rewards.